Switch to cibuildwheel for binary wheels?

[icemac]

I came across this blog post https://fruch.github.io/2020/12/29/github-actions describing that they are using https://github.com/joerick/cibuildwheel to build binary wheels. Maybe this could ease our setup, too.

[dataflake]

I just came across something else from Hanno that I had completely forgotten about: https://github.com/hannosch/zope_wheels

This uses a Docker container specifically made for building manylinux wheels (https://quay.io/repository/pypa/manylinux1_x86_64) to build wheels in bulk from the last tag on a list of repositories. It's Linux only, no Windows, though.

[dataflake]

@icemac This can be closed with the GHA-based build stretegy, right?

[icemac]

No, we could still use cibuildwheel, especially as it has support for e. E. macOS Apple Silicon (I saw in a PR in a repository (I do not remember which one) that adding the wheels for this M1 chip was just adding a parameter to an env variable).
I think it could make building the binary wheels easier but I never tried it.

[icemac]

cibuildwheel already has support for Python 3.10. We are using https://github.com/matthew-brett/multibuild to install missing Python versions on AppVeyor. As it uses https://www.python.org/ftp/python to download the needed Python version, it has no chance as there is no Python 3.10 version uploaded there, yet.

[henryiii]

FYI, you have to use the 2.0 beta (should be made into a final release in about a week pypa/cibuildwheel#657) and you have to enable CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS, because the API is not declared stable yet (actually, 3.10b4, which just came out and is about to land in cibuildwheel, just waiting on manylinux), is I think supposed to be the first ABI stable release.

[icemac]

I have a prototype here: zopefoundation/ExtensionClass#39 – at least it looks simpler than the currently existing version and it includes Windows wheels in GHA.

[icemac]

Currently we have a robust enough way to create wheels. So closing this issue for now.

[henryiii]

FYI, since this discussion three years ago, cibuildwheel has joined the PyPA and become the standard way to build wheels for most projects, handling lots of special cases, like the correct min version of macOS for 3.12 and 3.13.