natefoo/debian-wheel repository overview

⁠Build cross-Python Wheels on Debian

These images are created by, and used by Galaxy docker-build⁠ to build Python Wheels.

⁠Background

Wheel⁠ is Python's packaging format. Currently, there is no support for building redistributable wheels containing on Linux if the module being built contains C Extensions. This means that such modules must always be built from source, which can be a very time consuming process and often requires development packages to be installed that are not installed by default.

Galaxy⁠ makes extensive use of 3rd-party Python dependencies, many of which can take significant amounts of time to compile. To make Galaxy usable out of the box, we provide these dependencies in Python's old packaging format, eggs, but are switching to wheels.

I have been working on adding the necessary support⁠ to wheels to make this switch possible.

⁠Contents

These images use the official debian images⁠. On top of these, Python versions 2.6 and 2.7, compiled with both UCS-2 and UCS-4 Unicode encodings, are installed in /python/.

The natefoo/debian-wheel:8 and natefoo/debian-wheel:stretch images use those versions' multiarch⁠ support to provide the ability to build 32-bit wheels on those platforms. See the debian32-wheel images⁠ for more details.

The version of the wheel⁠ package included in this image is my in-development modified version⁠, which makes Linux wheels possible.