Feature request: provide an option to build just the source distribution, allow skipping wheel builds

[agriyakhetarpal]

Hi! Thanks for writing this tool – I have been finding it very useful. As noted in the issue title, I was wondering if it would be possible to provide an input with this GitHub Action, say, in the format below:

Some implementation details

    steps:

      - name:  Build and inspect this package
        uses: hynek/build-and-inspect-python-package@v1
        with:
          type: [sdist]  # can be an array with the entries [sdist, wheel] by default,
          # note: maybe having just [wheel] doesn't make sense, maybe it does?

or perhaps an input wheel: false/true, which would then map to the

1. python -m build --sdist, and
2. python -m build --wheel

commands respectively. I'm not sure how the workflow has been implemented, but it would be nice to add more things like displaying the size of the sdist as a whole or individual files in bytes / kilobytes, disable build isolation if needed as well (i.e., through the --no-build-isolation command-line flag); if it's possible – but then that's a separate issue from this one.

Motivation

I am using this action to inspect my package and look at the tree of contents of my source distribution, but most of the times I don't need to build a wheel as well and upload its GitHub Actions artifact alongside it, because I use cibuildwheel for that owing to compiled components in the wheel, in which case it is better to do so via a separate job matrix.

Footnotes

I am happy to submit a PR shall I receive some pointers for this in the current codebase :)

[agriyakhetarpal]

Actually, it would also make sense to allow users to opt out of uploading the PyPI README as well, if these extra options are considered. I read through the code and from a preliminary overview I assume it's just going to be some if-else clauses for the individual steps where these artifacts are produced – I can write a PR if needed.

[adrn]

I was just looking for this option myself!

[agriyakhetarpal]

@adrn, if you are interested – I ended up writing a variation of my own by copying what I wanted to the job summary outputs: https://github.com/agriyakhetarpal/hugo-python-distributions/blob/d735ead65079a7dd25411e8b254f3cb2c3760c9a/.github/workflows/ci.yml#L110

It uses the same tree command but with different command-line inputs (just a matter of personal preference), please feel free to use it.

Here is a sample output, the only difference is that I do not use the timestamps.

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PSA: I am still willing to contribute and implement this here by writing a PR in case others like me may require this functionality 🙂

[hynek]

Sorry, I haven't responded faster, I tend to work in bulks.

I'm trying to understand, what problem you're trying to solve by introducing complexity? I understand that you don't need the wheel or readme, but what's the harm?

[agriyakhetarpal]

Hi @hynek – no worries about the delay. There isn't too big of a problem, really – but, to advocate that this isn't too niche a use case, having this option would be helpful in some of the following ones, and this list is by no means exhaustive:

1. Building my wheel can take much more magnitudes of time in comparison to building an sdist, and I'm running BAIPP in a job that is parallel to the rest of my PR tests – especially if the wheel is a compiled one
2. I might have custom behaviour when building the source distribution, for example:
   a. I may be using scikit-build-core and may wish to execute CMake when building it
   a. Or, similarly, I might be overriding the default behaviour for the installation via command classes provided by setuptools, such as setuptools.command.build_py or setuptools.command.sdist
3. I am adding data files to arbitrary locations inside the sdist or if I don't want them inside the sdist (but I do want them in the wheel – where I don't need to inspect the wheel)
4. I like to build my wheel in-tree and not from the sdist (current behaviour), because python -m build --sdist --wheel and python -m build --wheel have different meanings

and so on.

[hynek]

Right, 4 is on purpose in fact, but I can see there's cases where it doesn't make sense.

I'll look into it, but it's gonna be an if/else in the shell block. I've seen you used a matrix which is elegant but also much slower/much more CI overhead and I'm really trying to make it as fast as possible (see also #86). 😅

[agriyakhetarpal]

Thanks! I'm definitely considering returning to your action instead of my own implementation, would be good to get support for uv. For some more reference, build added official support too quite recently: pypa/build#751. See also: astral-sh/uv#1510 in case they decide to add their own uv build command. These might be helpful for your PR (but build might take a bit longer to cut a release).