RFE: Package a wheel from the dist-info

[LecrisUT]

I was hoping to find a tool that can re-package a python project that is built from the system packages (e.g. dnf install python3-pip). Doesn't dist-info/RECORD have all the information to repackage the wheels?

[agronholm]

If you copy all the necessary files to a directory along with the dist-info directory, I guess this could be done? Not sure about scripts though. But why are you even doing this?

[pfmoore]

I don't believe there is any such utility, although you could probably write one yourself (the information should all be in the .dist-info directory, as you say).

[henryiii]

Guessing scikit-build/scikit-build-core#1027 might be the reason?

[agronholm]

Can you explain this to me please?

[LecrisUT]

For more context, when testing build-backends on Fedora we want to test them against the packages that are built and available on the distro. The full tests cover both --no-isolation and isolation tests, so the best way to fully test is to point pip to a pre-downloaded.

[henryiii]

These tests are trying to test build isolation, which won't ever just package up the Fedora packages and make wheels out of them, it will always pull from an index like PyPI. So it seems to me that pre-downloading files from PyPI would make more sense than turning the existing installed packages back into wheels. If Fedora patched one, for example, the end user would not get that patched one when building in isolation outside of the tests.

[LecrisUT]

Well there are two scenarios with build isolation:

• User runs pip install, in which case the PyPI packages are used. Upstream already covers this
• Building of python3-foo which does not use the PyPI index instead these are translated to equivalent packages. Coverage for this is missing because there is no internet connection, and the versions would be different then those pre-downloaded from PyPI

[henryiii]

We do test this in scikit-build-core, it's called "PEP 517" builds in our test suite (isolated builds are called "PEP 518". Not sure I like the naming scheme I chose now, but that's what the test use). Building python3-foo will always use --no-build-isolation, and we have no-build-isolation tests.