distros patch the build process when they package stuff for the distro all the time. why would they "have to" do anything? i'm not super familiar with gentoo but it seems to me like any other 90s era distro where the distro mediates the relationship between the user and the upstream developer for all packages, by applying patches and potentially doing whatever build they want to.

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pdonis 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Gentoo builds every package from source on every user's machine, and when each user does an update, every package that changed gets rebuilt from source again.

So every Gentoo user that has a Python project that uses uv-build ends up having to rebuild uv-build, and then every Python project they have that uses it, every time uv-build pushes an update.

Other distros don't necessarily have quite the same problem because, if they include packages of Python projects, they don't normally track the build backend as a dependency. So if uv-build pushes an update, the distro would push an updated package for uv-build, but they wouldn't look at every Python project they package to see if it used uv-build as a build backend and rebuild it if it did. It's the "rebuild from source every time" aspect of Gentoo that forces that connection.

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jitl 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

i guess gentoo is rolling-release, vs something like debian where every package is frozen in time (+ backports), and debian does seem to largely solve the coordination problem by making everything on the system use a fixed version of some package; with rare situations allowing >1 version of the package at a time.

my take on linux distros being annoyed by their own policies is that perhaps they should change the policy. in this case, perhaps they should pretend uv-build updates once a month or something.

for example, they seem to be fine doing a quick sed on pyproject.toml (https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/dev-python/pa...) or patching stuff for compat (https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/dev-python/as...)

This is what i mean when it seems typical for a distro to monkey around with packages and/or their build system. These were just the first two packages i clicked on in dev-python. maybe others are "pure upstream", but there's definitely the capability here to just... not have the problem?

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BigTTYGothGF 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems like a design flaw in gentoo that previously hadn't been an issue because build tools weren't being updated nearly as often as uv-build is.

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swiftcoder 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> they don't normally track the build backend as a dependency... It's the "rebuild from source every time" aspect of Gentoo that forces that connection

I don't follow. This feels like Gentoo is mishandling build-tool dependencies.

Does Gentoo also recompile every C/C++ library in the dependency tree every time GCC pushes a minor version bump?

	▲	fuzzy2 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		IIRC, rebuilds to GCC outputs are/were only recommended when the compiler "profile" changes. So basically whenever the ABI could no longer be guaranteed.
	▲	ForHackernews 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Strictly speaking, they should, right? Differences in GCC could produce differences in anything it compiles.