This could be BC breaking, because there was a period of time when we use py_limited_api=True but don't enforce the flag, and now that we will start enforcing the flag, people's custom extensions may fail to build.
This is strictly still better behavior, as it is sketchy to claim CPython agnosticism without the flag, but calling this out as potential people yelling at us. Ways to mitigate this risk + reasons this may not be too big a deal:
- People haven't known about py_limited_api for extensions much due to lack of docs from python so usage is low right now
- My current tutorial is in store to make new users of py_limited_api pass this flag, so it'd be a noop for them.
Test plan:
* Locally i'm confident as I tried rebuilding ao with this change and it reliably failed (cuz importing torch/extension.h is a nono)
* Unit test wise, the normal python_agnostic one I added should work
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/145764
Approved by: https://github.com/ezyang, https://github.com/zou3519, https://github.com/albanD
Getting tested with ao, but now there is a real test i added.
## What does this PR do?
We want to allow custom PyTorch extensions to be able to build one wheel for multiple Python versions, in other words, achieve python agnosticism. It turns out that there is such a way that setuptools/Python provides already! Namely, if the user promises to use only the Python limited API in their extension, they can pass in `py_limited_api` to their Extension class and to the bdist_wheel command (with a min python version) in order to build 1 wheel that will suffice across multiple Python versions.
Sounds lovely! Why don't people do that already with PyTorch? Well 2 things. This workflow is hardly documented (even searching for python agnostic specifically does not reveal many answers) so I'd expect that people simply don't know about it. But even if they did, _PyTorch_ custom Extensions would still not work because we always link torch_python, which does not abide by py_limited_api rules.
So this is where this PR comes in! We respect when the user specifies py_limited_api and skip linking torch_python under that condition, allowing users to enroll in the provided functionality I just described.
## How do I know this PR works?
I manually tested my silly little ultra_norm locally (with `import python_agnostic`) and wrote a test case for the extension showing that
- torch_python doesn't show up in the ldd tree
- no Py- symbols show up
It may be a little confusing that our test case is actually python-free (more clean than python-agnostic) but it is sufficient (and not necessary) towards showing that this change works.
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/138088
Approved by: https://github.com/ezyang, https://github.com/albanD
