A plea not to use uv-build for Python (blogs.gentoo.org)

submitted 1 week ago by bignose@programming.dev to c/python@programming.dev

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@mgorny@treehouse.systems:

After seeing yet another dozen packages lose keywords on Gentoo because of a single key dependency switching to uv-build, I would like to plea on behalf of Gentoo users: please don’t use uv-build as a build backend.

Just to be clear, this is not about uv itself or any other Astral tools; these are good tools with a nice and responsive upstream. The uv-build backend is one thing we have to disagree on. I’m not saying it’s bad; I’m saying that its benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks.

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[-] Senal@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago

I mostly agree, but there is a tradeoff here between effort and resource usage

Do you spend the extra x months dev time to go from 800Mb to 200Mb?

how about another x months to go from 200MB to 100MB?

100MB -> 80Mb? 80Mb -> 67Mb ?

and that's only memory footprint, not performance, test coverage, infrastructure etc.

We've swung way in to the "800Mb binary ?, meh, they all have RAM to spare" (looking at you specifically fucking electron shells) and i fully agree we should be way more on the side of resource usage optimisation.

Optimising for deadlines and effort costs is also a consideration, if we don't acknowledge and address that as part of the conversation, it'll be seen as gold-plating or "perfect is the enemy of good".