PEP 735: Dependency Groups in pyproject.toml

[oscarbenjamin]

@oscarbenjamin

@sirosen

build backends would expand any Dependency Groups when building distributions

Is the suggestion that this would happen when producing an sdist as well as a wheel?

@pf_moore

I would hope so, yes. I’m not clear why anyone would think otherwise

Does this require the build backend to edit the pyproject.toml when creating the sdist?

I’m asking these questions because:

1. I thought that having “tools” edit pyproject.toml was frowned upon but maybe it is okay when producing an sdist.
2. The backwards compatibility concerns for adding new syntax in pyproject.toml seem significantly less to me if the new syntax is not found in sdists.

Expecting build backends, IDEs, dependabot etc to update to be able to understand some new pyproject.toml syntax in VCS checkouts does not seem like a big deal to me. These are developer tools and the developer can choose whether to use the new syntax and what tools they want to use.

What would be a more significant problem is if PyPI started filling up with sdists that break installation for old versions of pip etc.