Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

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> nothing compels you to choose the backend specified in pyproject.toml

This comes as a complete surprise to me. I thought the whole point of specifying the build backend in pyproject.toml was so the project owner can choose which build backend their project gets built with, and have that choice automatically enforced by tools.

Are you saying this kind of thing is allowed by the Python spec? If so, where? Can you give a specific document?

> The author even highlights

What he means is that the project owner doesn't have to, for example, use uv-build as their build backend in pyproject.toml just because they are using uv as their overall project management tool. I do not think he means that he, as a distro packager, is free to just ignore what's in pyproject.toml.

> the project owner can choose which build backend their project gets built with

When following an automated workflow implemented by an installer or other tooling, yes.

But you own the sdist file, and the archive contents, after downloading it. Nothing prevents you from editing pyproject.toml, using a build frontend/system that offers a flag to disregard PEP 517, running your own custom scripts on the data, manually copying the files into the target environment, or whatever else you can think of.

And since Gentoo is doing its own packaging with its own package format, nothing prevents them from doing the same kind of patching.

> you own the sdist file, and the archive contents, after downloading it.

If you're forking the project, sure. But I don't think that's what Gentoo is doing.

If you're trying to build what the project owner intended for you to build, I don't see how you can just ignore what the project owner specified. Nor do I see how that is allowed by the Python specs. That's why I asked you for a reference if you think it is in fact allowed by the Python specs.

If your position is that the Python specs don't allow you to just ignore pyproject.toml, but a distro can just ignore what's in the Python specs, I don't agree with the latter either, but it's a different position, and I'm not sure which one you're taking.

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