[Biopython-dev] Notes on experimenting with making wheels

[Peter Cock]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 5:10 PM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 4:14 PM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Using my elderly 32 bit Windows XP machine,
>>
>> 1) Clean install of python-2.7.11.msi (for all users), which
>> is currently the latest version - and comes with pip.
>>
>> 2) Upgrade pip
>>
>> C:\Python27\Scripts\pip install --upgrade pip
>>
>> (Ignored scary error about being unable to delete a temp
>> folder using os.unlink via shutil.py)
>>
>> 3) Install setuptools and wheel
>>
>> C:\Python27\Scripts\pip install --upgrade wheel setuptools
>>
>> 4) Install binary wheel of numpy, got numpy 1.11.0
>>
>> C:\Python27\Scripts\pip install --only-binary numpy numpy
>>
>> 4) Get clean checkout of Biopython from git,
>>
>> 5) Build the wheel,
>>
>> C:\Python27\python setup.py bdist_wheel
>>
>> (Ignored warning about config variables Py_DEBUG and
>> WITH_PYMALLOC being unset and that the Python ABI
>> tag may be incorrect.)
>>
>> Giving:
>>
>> dist/biopython-1.67_-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl (1917KB)
>
> Those warnings appear to be harmless based on this issue:
>
> https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3383
>
> Peter

On wider reading there could be a glitch here also
dependent on the version of pip used on the developer's
machine to build the wheel, and on the version of pip
used to install it:

https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3383
https://bitbucket.org/pypa/wheel/issues/169/incompatible-wheels-on-windows-depending

Note if we build the wheels on a machine without numpy,
then setup.py will leave out the numpy specific bits (at
least, those needing the numpy C code which it will skip
compiling).

We may need to explicitly add the numpy dependency
to setup.py, with a pinned NumPy version to ensure the
binary ABI matches. I think we'll need to consult with
the NumPy developers on this - hopefully we're not the
first downstream package using NumPy at the C level
trying to use the binary wheel format.

Peter