In retrospect, the word “build” seems to have very heavyweight connotations, e.g. invoking separate toolchains for compilation or linking or transpiling or whatever. This is certainly the case for me. I guess if I had my wish, these steps would be split up with different names and different docs for different audiences.
The simple step of “assembling a wheel” would get a much less intimidating name like “pack”, with “build” would reserved for cases where all that extra work is needed. Then pure-python projects would only have to see and learn and know about how to “pack” a wheel, and could ignore the mountain of overlapping and semi-conflicting tools for all the different use-cases that involve (what I would consider) and actual “build”. [1]
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every project has the same “pack” step, but some also have a “build” step earlier ↩︎