A proposal for sdist build complexity signaling, providing user agency

[pf_moore (Paul Moore)]

@kknechtel

The cases where Pip could verify an sdist’s requirements before building are ones where there is no setup.py (and an explicit listing in pyproject.toml), and those likely have no good reason not to have wheels anyway.

That’s not accurate. Assuming PEP 643, it is possible for an installer to read the PKG-INFO file from the sdist, confirm that it’s metadata 2.2 or later, confirm that Requires-Dist is not included in the Dynamic metadata field, and then reliably use those dependencies without doing a build.

But if any of those conditions isn’t true, you have to ask the backend. The setup.py file isn’t relevant, nor is pyproject.toml.