Now I know that the PyPA guys do a ton of work to make all this stuff less brittle, and indeed, Python packaging has improved a lot over the years. But overall it's still brittle, complex, difficult to debug and reproduce, and generally falls apart randomly with a frequency that does not inspire trust.
There's not really a lot you can do about this though, is there?
It's not that hard to test that things work, or to see the failures. Comments I've seen like 'there should be a server that installs every package on its own and makes sure its tests pass' have a bit of an issue: we already know the issues exist. Having a big list of them in one place doesn't really give us a lot more information.
What's the solution? If you need to compile native dependencies, how do you take PyPI and Python packaging in general and make those native dependencies able to be portably compiled, reliably, on any platform?
Things that are straight up unworkable:
* Bundling native dependencies as binaries
* Specifying a single version of your native dependencies (the 'shrinkwrap' approach) and every library having its own
