Month: July 2024

Optimizing distutils-r1.eclass via wheel reuse

Yesterday I’ve enabled a new distutils-r1.eclass optimization: wheel reuse. Without this optimization, the eclass would build a separate wheel for every Python implementation enabled, and then install every one of these wheels. In many cases, this meant repeatedly building the same thing. With the optimization enabled, under some circumstances the eclass will be able to build one (or two) wheels, and install them for all implementations.

This change brings the eclass behavior closer to the behavior of package managers such as pip. While this will cause no change for users who build packages for a single Python version only, it can bring some nice speedup when building for multiple interpreters. Particularly, pure Python packages using setuptools will no longer incur the penalty of having to start setuptools multiple times (which is quite slow), and packages using the stable ABI won’t have to build roughly identical extensions multiple times.

In this post, I’m going to shortly go over a few design considerations of the new feature.

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The review-work balance, and other dilemmas

One of the biggest problems of working in such a large project as Gentoo, is that there’s always a lot of work to be done. Once you get engaged deeply enough, no matter how hard you’re going to try, the backlog will just keep growing. There are just so many things that need to be done, and someone has to do them.

Sooner or later, you are going to start facing some dilemmas, such as:

  • This befell me, because nobody else was willing to do that. Should I continue overburdening myself with this, or should I leave it and let it rot?
  • I have more time than other people on the team. Should I continue doing the bulk of the work, or leave more of it to them?
  • What is the right balance between reviewing contributions, and doing the work myself?

In this post, I’d like to discuss these problems from my perspective as a long-time Gentoo developer.
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