Building different versions of a package for different editable venvs from a single checkout

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1

There is a dependency of a project of mine, on which I’d like to hack. That dependency (kivy) declares a few optional dependencies, and builds a few native modules with cython; my project requires a given set of them (actually an empty set), and running kivy’s unit tests requires [dev,full].

The two projects cannot use a shared venv because of the different required configurations, and they both want kivy as editable to be able to easily test a change in the 2 projects.

Incidentally, this seems to be the same set of constraints that would be needed to incrementally run tests on a range of of python versions using several venvs in editable mode.

Any ideas how to get such a setup to work?

2

You’ll need some kind of environment manager where you declare different dependencies per environment. Using tox, you might do:

pyproject.toml:

dependencies = [
  "kivy",
  ...
]

dependency-groups = [
  "kivydev" = "kivy[dev,full]",
]

tox.ini:

[tox]
envlist =
  py314
  py314-kivy

[testenv]
dependency_groups =
  kivy: kivydev
...

You’ll need to read tox’s documentation to figure out your full config. pixi also has capabilities for defining environments with different features. I’m sure others do as well.

3

Ah, you mean tuning my project configuration to be able to use a kivy config compatible, rather than attempting to use the two different configs at once. Sounds like a good idea, I’ll dig what uv has to offer since I’m using hat one for now, but tox definitely seems to have interesting features. Thanks!