Category: History

The distutils (and therefore setuptools) build system supports building C extensions in parallel, through the use of -j (--parallel) option, passed either to build_ext or build command. Gentoo distutils-r1.eclass has always passed these options to speed up builds of packages that feature multiple C files.

However, the switch to PEP517 build backend made this problematic. While the backend uses the respective commands internally, it doesn’t provide a way to pass options to them. In this post, I’d like to explore the different ways we attempted to resolve this problem, trying to find an optimal solution that would let us benefit from parallel extension builds while preserving minimal overhead for packages that wouldn’t benefit from it (e.g. pure Python packages). I will also include a fresh benchmark results to compare these methods.
Continue reading “Optimizing parallel extension builds in PEP517 builds”

The Python distutils build system, as well as setuptools (that it was later merged into), used a two-stage build: first, a build command would prepare a built package version (usually just copy the .py files, sometimes compile Python extensions) into a build directory, then an install command would copy them to the live filesystem, or a staging directory. Curious enough, distutils were an early adopter of out-of-source builds — when used right (which often enough wasn’t the case), no writes would occur in the source directory and all modifications would be done directly in the build directory.

Today, in the PEP517 era, two-stage builds aren’t really relevant anymore. Build systems were turned into black boxes that spew wheels. However, setuptools still internally uses the two-stage build and the build directory, and therefore it still remains relevant to Gentoo eclasses. In this post, I’d like to shortly tell how we dealt with it over the years.
Continue reading “The story of distutils build directory in Gentoo”

I created the Multilib project back in November 2013 (though the effort itself started roughly a year earlier) with the goal of maintaining the multilib eclasses and porting Gentoo packages to them. Back in the day, we were even requested to co-maintain a few packages whose maintainers were opposed to multilib ports. In June 2015, last of the emul-linux-x86 packages were removed and our work has concluded.

The project continued to exist for the purpose of maintaining the eclasses and providing advice. Today, I can say that the project has served its purpose and it is time to retire it. Most of the team members have already left, the multilib knowledge that we advised on before is now common developer knowledge. I am planning to take care of the project-maintained eclasses personally, and move the relevant documentation to the general wiki space.

At the same time, I would like to take this opportunity to tell the history of our little multilib project.

Continue reading “Retiring the multilib project”

I’m a Gentoo developer for over 10 years already. I’ve been doing a lot of different things throughout that period. However, Python was pretty much always somewhere within my area of interest. I don’t really recall how it all started. Maybe it had something to do with Portage being written in Python. Maybe it was the natural next step after programming in Perl.

I feel like the upcoming switch to Python 3.9 is the last step in the prolonged effort of catching up with Python. Over the last years, we’ve been working real hard to move Python support forward, to bump neglected packages, to enable testing where tests are available, to test packages on new targets and unmask new targets as soon as possible. We have improved the processes a lot. Back when we were switching to Python 3.4, it took almost a year from the first false start attempt to the actual change. We started using Python 3.5 by default after upstream dropped bugfix support for it. In a month from now, we are going to start using Python 3.9 even before 3.10 final is released.

I think this is a great opportunity to look back and see what changed in the Gentoo Python ecosystem, in the last 10 years.
Continue reading “10 Years’ Perspective on Python in Gentoo”