On 16.04.2015 19:44, Donald Stufft wrote:
> 
> Donald Stufft added the comment:
> 
>> Perhaps you can point me to some use cases where the triple
>> platform tag is really useful.
> 
> If I understand correctly (and ABI isn't my strong suite), it would be useful in the sense that you could utilize it to create a sort of "fat wheel" that included the .so's for multiple architectures and then pip could simply drop them all into place and have the interpreter decide which one to load. This is useful because maybe you have one .so in a wheel and 30 .py files, it's somewhat wasteful (both disk space and in cache efficiency) to have 10 different wheel files and those 30 .py files duplicated when it could be possible to have a single one serving 10 different architectures.

Well, it's even more wasteful if you have to download 100MB wheels
with all the different platforms when the dedicated wheel would just
need 1.5MB.

This approach has been considered a few times in distutils history
and no one really liked it because it would increase the download
requirements for the users a lot. It does make things easier for
the packages, though, but then again, this can also be had
by having different subdirs in the wheel or other package
format to address the issue of having name collisions.

Today, you usually have a web installer take care of grabbing
only the bits you need.