Arvados

Peter Amstutz wrote in #note-4:

Brett: we should see if binary wheels exist for pyCURL and llfuse that are statically linked and can run without needed the user to install OS packages like libcurl and libfuse.

As far as I can tell neither project publishes prebuilt wheels, at least for Debian 11. Testing process:

$ podman pull docker.io/library/debian:11-slim
$ podman run -ti debian:11-slim
# apt-get install python3-pip python3-venv
# python3 -m venv /opt/arvados
# /opt/arvados/bin/pip install wheel
# /opt/arvados/bin/pip install 'arvados_fuse==2.6.3'
(after that failed:)
# /opt/arvados/bin/pip install 'arvados-python-client==2.6.3'

In both cases pip ended up downloading source for various versions, and they both failed looking for curl-config and pkg-config respectively.

Instead of completely deprecating and removing OS packages, maybe what we should do is have a Python version support policy and if an OS doesn't provide a new enough Python, we just don't publish Python packages. In which case the only code change we need to make is to be able to ignore building and publishing Python packages for specific distros.

Tom had a great idea, we could use PyInstaller to make self-contained packages for OS versions where the native Python is too old, see #20893