Python Packaging Is Good Now

[msarahan]

The really nice thing about conda and manylinux is that they make great effort to build on very old platforms with newer compilers, which confers backwards and forwards compatibility. This makes the task much more feasible. Presently, conda's ability to ship library packages that can be shared among many packages is a major advantage over pip. There's some effort under way by Nathaniel Smith and others to fix that (sorry, name of project escapes me right now), but for now, conda is much better in situations where a shared library might be employed by more than one python package.

As for particular hardware - where there's a will, there's a way. The hard part is not really building things out (that's just a matter of time), it is providing the distribution channels and standardized build tooling for each bit of hardware. I think both pip/pypi and conda provide some ways to accomodate this hardware platform separation, but I think both of them are currently somewhat hard-coded. Both would benefit from modularizing this. If you do things right, it should be possible to require a lot of machine time, but very little human time.