Release 20.10

[dHannasch]

Are there any plans for when Release 20.10 might be? Asking mainly because pip will be able to turn on support for musl wheels for everyone as soon as packaging cuts a release, since the support is already in the packaging main branch.

(https://hub.docker.com/orgs/pythonpackagesonalpine/repositories is already successfully building some Alpine images using musl wheels, using a hacked version of pip with the main branch of packaging. Of course, once musl wheels are fully supported and start getting published, there will be no more need for https://hub.docker.com/orgs/pythonpackagesonalpine/repositories.)

[uranusjr]

I think it should be 21.0, but yes, a release for pip 21.2 would be very desired indeed. The pip release will happen sometime next month, so it would be best if packaging could have a release in a week or so.

[MrMino]

Is there anything specific needed for this to happen (i.e. something we can help with), or is it just the question of putting the release together?

[brettcannon]

@MrMino as long as there are no open PRs or issues that we feel needs to go in, then it's simply a matter of cutting the release.

[puetzk]

The other thing I would really want in pip 20.2 is the distutils -> sysconfig migration, both to fix deprecations coming in cypthon 3.10.0 (#433) and to fix wrong-wheel bugs currently occurring on windows when the vcvars environment is set (pypa/pip#8649).

Which was implemented in #396, and is already merged to main, so "simply a matter of cutting the release" would cover both of these issues.

[brettcannon]

I think a 21.0 release should probably contain:

1. Tidy up manylinux tests and musllinux manifest #438
2. Drop LegacySpecifier and LegacyVersion #407

[brettcannon]

We've decided to postpone #407 in the name of time for the next pip release, so I think we can release as soon as anyone has time to cut a release (although if someone wants to help by making sure the changelog is up-to-date that would be appreciated).

[puetzk]

Here's 3 items that seem changelog-worthy to me

* Fixed ``~=`` Specifier checks which include prerelease suffix to match PEP440 (:issue:`100`)
* Replace use of deprecated ``distutils`` with ``sysconfig`` to support Python 3.10 (:issue:`433`)
  This also fixes cpython_tags returning wrong values when VSCMD_ARG_TGT_ARCH is set
  (i.e. when vcvarsall has configured the environment to have MSVC cross-compiling)
  and the target architecture is different than the python.exe being run (:issue:`327`)
* Introduce platform tag for musllinux (PEP 656)

[pradyunsg]

I'll do this today.

[pradyunsg]

Done! https://pypi.org/project/packaging/21.0/

[pradyunsg]

Oh, and we needed at least 2 fixes to the release pipeline stuff, since we've dropped Python 2 support:

• 38aa73a
• 093e24f