Python ports: should we use wheel files?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 31, 2018, at 05:11, Enrico Maria Crisostomo wrote:

> The definition of a wheel file is the following:
> 
>> Wheel (in this context) is a project that adds the bdist_wheel command to distutils/setuptools. This produces a cross platform binary packaging format (called “wheels” or “wheel files” and defined in PEP 427) that allows Python libraries, even those including binary extensions, to be installed on a system without needing to be built locally.  In the case in point: one TensorFlow dependency has a native component that needs to be built locally.
> 
> Now, the problem.  macOS is a platform where TensorFlow is _built_ and _tested_ by upstream.  Some of its dependencies (e.g.: grpcio) are packaged and distributed as wheel files.  Hence, what upstream supports is the state of a system after the dependencies are installed from wheel files.

For what macOS versions and architectures are they compiled? I assume the list is smaller than what MacPorts currently supports.