On Thursday, March 11, 2021 at 1:28:12 PM UTC-8 François Bissey wrote: > > On 12/03/2021, at 09:46, Matthias Koeppe <matthia...@gmail.com> wrote: > > you get this type of build isolation for free if you make the > documentation a separate distribution according to PEP 517 > (pyproject.toml), for which you declare the package as a build-system > requirement. > > I have been wondering for a while why you want to have those kinds of > requirements. > In the autotools world there is no issues with building documentation as > part of the > building process even if, potentially like sage, you want some content to > be dynamically > generated by executing the just built package. >
Well, autotools does not even have a mechanism to advertise dependencies/requirements -- other than "configure" exiting with an error if they are not satisfied. You as a downstream package maintainer declare and update the requirements based on (in the best case) package documentation. > And that’s when it hits me. In a lot of python packages, building the > documentation, > when it is available, a different build system is used than when you where > building the package itself. > In a typical case, you build with distutils/setuptools and then invoke > make to start > sphinx to build the doc. [...] since you often use a completely different > way of building stuff, > those PEPs literally mandate a separate package. Yes, pretty much. In the past (pre PEP-517/518) one could get away with treating docbuild etc. as something depending on "optional dependencies", like using Sphinx if Sphinx happens to be installed. This is no longer a thing in the much more structured modern Python build system world. One gains reproducible builds and overall (hopefully) more robustness. And then -- of course likely not relevant for gentoo -- there is also the distinction between source and binary distributions (wheels): For the package itself, many users have a good reason to build it from source; but for a separate documentation package, most users do not really benefit from building it from source - they can as well install a prebuilt wheel providing the documentation. These users will then not have a need to install Sphinx at all. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/d815d855-0cb6-4aba-9f84-d1f0db1c39f1n%40googlegroups.com.
