Subject: Re: [bug#65010] [PATCH 0/8] Misc Python build system improvements

From: Lars-Dominik Braun <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2023 08:31:47 +0200

Hi Marius,

> About 'wheel': that package *is* actually required by the build system
> (as opposed to pypa-build!): I think we should make it available by
> default (e.g. with a #:wheel argument), or propagate it from the build
> systems.  It makes no sense to add it to _all_ pyproject-build-system
> consumers.

it’s not added to all of them. After submitting this patch I realized
it’s actually a dependency of setuptools (bdist_wheel), which otherwise
cannot create wheels. Other backends afaik have their own method of
building wheels or depend on a wheel-generating library. So it might
make sense to add python-wheel as a propagated input to
python-setuptools. I didn’t have time to try it yet though.

> This commit title is weird.  The build is already working, but using a
> workaround that is no longer needed.

Probably a leftover from all the rebasing.

> > +  #:use-module (ice-9 textual-ports)
> This import seems unused?

Yeah, possibly a leftover from previous experiments.

> Perhaps this should also be documented in the manual.

Indeed. I didn’t know we had separate documentation in the manual.

> > -                          (configure-flags ''())
> > +                          (configure-flags ''(@))
> 
> I don't understand how the @ makes it a dictionary.  Can you enlighten
> me?  Either here, or in a comment?  :-)

It’s an implementation detail of our JSON library. The configure-flags
are directly passed to it.

Lars