Clarify allowed minor version of macos tags

[anuraaga]

Issue Description

I am working on publishing a macos wheel and learned platform tags with minor versions such as 14_5 aren't allowed past 11_0

astral-sh/uv#16337

This makes some sense because before 11, the minor version was the major version and since 11 it is more traditional.

Does it make sense to update the docs with this requirement? I'm happy to send a PR after confirming my understanding.

Also should pypi reject wheels with the disallowed tags? I was quite confused to be able to publish a wheel but not install it with uv.

Code of Conduct

• I am aware that participants in this repository must follow the PSF Code of Conduct.

[notatallshaw]

Updates and clarifications to the spec itself are discussed at: https://discuss.python.org/c/packaging/14 and then reflected here once agreed that is appropriate.

FWIW I can not find any supporting evidence of @konstin's comment, but it should be discussed on DPO, not here, because that is the place for community discussion of standards, lots of people don't follow packaging.python.org GitHub issues.

[konstin]

I'm not aware of any standard, around this, only that the implementation is shared between uv and packaging used by pip:

https://github.com/pypa/packaging/blob/a85e63daecba56bbb829492624a844d306053504/src/packaging/tags.py#L452-L460

[notatallshaw]

This seems to have been done to get MacOS 11+ working in packaging without having to coordinate with wheel:

pypa/packaging#319 (comment)
pypa/packaging#319 (comment)

If this is important to OP I really do think you need to bring it up on https://discuss.python.org/c/packaging/14 as either:

1. The standard needs to be clarified, or
2. packaging (and wheel?) needs to be fixed, or documented as not actually standards compliant.

[konstin]

Given that packaging's implementation makes it a de-facto standard for Python (and uv is following that), does it makes to update packaging.python.org with this information and ask PyPI to reject wheels that pip always rejects? We can post on DPO to get attention to the docs PR, but otherwise this seems like a clarification to something non-controversial to me that prevents users from running into problems like astral-sh/uv#16337.

[notatallshaw]

but otherwise this seems like a clarification to something non-controversial

I have no idea how controversial it is, and my understanding is a thread in DPO is used to determine that. As a prior example to something I would have considered uncontroversial but went through this process:

• https://discuss.python.org/t/are-developmental-releases-a-type-of-pre-release/81666/
• Clarify that dev releases are considered pre-releases when handling them #1857

On the other side of things, I'm used to finding edge cases where packaging is not following the spec and the solution is to fix packaging: pypa/packaging#794 / pypa/packaging#897 / pypa/packaging#942

[anuraaga]

Thanks @notatallshaw - FWIW now that I know the issue, I won't have any problems and my goal was to try for others to not run into the same problem. The docs site has a "Contribute to this guide" link that pointed to this repo, and not DPO, so I filed this issue.

I like using familiar OSS tools and don't want to create another forum account so won't be pursuing this on DPO - I like contributing but also have boundaries. If it seems fine to maintain the status quo where the tools don't match since it's a corner case, let's close this issue. Otherwise I hope for a maintainer to take up the cause.

[notatallshaw]

That reasonable, there are a lot of edge cases in packaging where nobody cares enough to have things accurately enshrined in the spec, and therefore it becomes a grey area determined by which tooling has implemented what.

I do think this should be raised to the PyPI team, to see if they are enough to raise this as a spec issue, if no one else does I will make a post summarizing these discussions on https://github.com/pypi/warehouse when I have a moment.

[notatallshaw]

Btw, some related packaging, pip, and wheel issues:

• packaging.tags._platform_tags() does not report current OS version packaging#435
• Feature request: "none of the wheel's tags match" should show what doesn't match pip#9621
• wheel 0.36.0 fails on macOS 11 (Big Sur) when MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=11 wheel#385

[konstin]

I posted on DPO: https://discuss.python.org/t/codify-that-macos-platform-tags-use-minor-version-0-for-macos-11/104616