Evidently the point of the manylinux project is to make it easy to distribute Python binary wheels for Linux, so that basically is their use case. Though they'r

Evidently the point of the manylinux project is to make it easy to distribute Python binary wheels for Linux, so that basically is their use case. Though they're not building for arbitrary old versions — they're building for a concrete set of old OS versions defined by Python standards. I think the idea is that you don't want to require everyone installing your Python module to have a full set of build tools installed, so they're providing a way to distribute a binary module that supports a guaranteed set of supported Linuxes.