Pip check incorrectly detects multi-platform distributons as unsupported

[potiuk]

Description

It seems when a distribution whl supports multiple platforms, seems that pip check incorrectly reports such packages as unsupported.

This happens for example for pagefind-bin package - which supports both glibc and musl on aarch64 (for example in docker on MacOS ARM)

Expected behavior

pip check should not complain that package is unsupported when pip install just installed it :)

pip version

25.3

Python version

3.10.19

OS

Mac OS Tahoe 26.1 (25B78), ARM, M4. Docker: Linux 3d30c5d5427b 6.12.54-linuxkit #1 SMP Tue Nov 4 21:21:47 UTC 2025 aarch64 GNU/Linux

How to Reproduce

docker run -it python:3.10-slim-bookworm bash
# in docker
> pip install --upgrade pip # upgrades to latest pip
> pip install pagefind-bin==1.4.0  # installs (correctly) pagefind-bin
> pip check # fails with pagefind_bin 1.4.0 is not supported on this platform

Output

⏚ [jarekpotiuk:~/code/airflow] indexed-search(+4/-4)+ 24s ± docker run -it python:3.10-slim-bookworm bash
root@87f0f4ce94e0:/# pip install --upgrade pip
Requirement already satisfied: pip in /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages (23.0.1)
Collecting pip
  Downloading pip-25.3-py3-none-any.whl (1.8 MB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1.8/1.8 MB 18.8 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Installing collected packages: pip
  Attempting uninstall: pip
    Found existing installation: pip 23.0.1
    Uninstalling pip-23.0.1:
      Successfully uninstalled pip-23.0.1
Successfully installed pip-25.3
WARNING: Running pip as the 'root' user can result in broken permissions and conflicting behaviour with the system package manager. It is recommended to use a virtual environment instead: https://pip.pypa.io/warnings/venv
root@87f0f4ce94e0:/# pip install pagefind-bin==1.4.0
Collecting pagefind-bin==1.4.0
  Downloading pagefind_bin-1.4.0-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.musllinux_1_1_aarch64.whl.metadata (1.0 kB)
Downloading pagefind_bin-1.4.0-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.musllinux_1_1_aarch64.whl (9.4 MB)
   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 9.4/9.4 MB 47.3 MB/s  0:00:00
Installing collected packages: pagefind-bin
Successfully installed pagefind-bin-1.4.0
WARNING: Running pip as the 'root' user can result in broken permissions and conflicting behaviour with the system package manager, possibly rendering your system unusable. It is recommended to use a virtual environment instead: https://pip.pypa.io/warnings/venv. Use the --root-user-action option if you know what you are doing and want to suppress this warning.
root@87f0f4ce94e0:/# pip check
pagefind_bin 1.4.0 is not supported on this platform

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the PSF Code of Conduct.

[ichard26]

This is a bug with pagefind-bin's WHEEL metadata. If you inspect the 1.4.0 wheel for ARM64, the wheel tag is included in its compressed form. This is not valid according to the wheel specification:

Wheel-Version: 1.0
Generator: scripts/build/binary_only_wheel.py
Root-Is-Purelib: false
Tag:
 py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.musllinux_1_1_aarch64

See point 11 here under "file contents" on the specification: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/binary-distribution-format/#file-contents

Tag is the wheel’s expanded compatibility tags; in the example the filename would contain py2.py3-none-any.

I've filed a PR to fix their wheel build script: Pagefind/pagefind#989.

[ichard26]

I've also filed a PR to fix this in ziglang's build script which seems to be where projects are copying and pasting their build scripts from. ziglang/zig-pypi#40

[potiuk]

Thanks a lot for those PRs and issues! Indeed, that's where it should be fixed.

Small question - would it make sense also to refuse installing such package with pip install ? That would give those who make such a mistake nearly instant incentive to fix it ?