[Python] Do we need to build both unicode variants of pyarrow wheels?

[asfimport]

I noticed that pandas does not provide a UCS2 wheel for Python 2.7. We're building both UCS2 and UCS4. I am curious if the UCS2 wheels are widely used enough to make this worthwhile

Reporter: Wes McKinney / @wesm

_{Note: This issue was originally created as ARROW-3084. Please see the migration documentation for further details.}

[asfimport]

Antoine Pitrou / @pitrou:
Using pypnfo, it seems pyarrow-0.10.0-cp27-cp27mu-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (UCS4, I presume) got 35k downloads while pyarrow-0.10.0-cp27-cp27m-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (UCS2) got 4k downloads, which is 10x less but still not negligible. Perhaps some people self-compile Python in UCS2 mode on Linux...

@xhochy

[asfimport]

Uwe Korn / @xhochy:
I'm not sure where the request came from but I added the package on user request. It is probably a small user base but the overhead for us to build this on release is very small. We should skip it in CI though.

[asfimport]

Antoine Pitrou / @pitrou:
I expect this issue will get fixed simply when we abandon 2.7.