I am trying to build a Python distribution (wheel) using the

python_distribution

target using a handwritten

setup.py

file. The docs say that

If you use a handwritten setup.py ... Pants will bundle whatever the script tells it to.

Running

python3 setup.py bdist_wheel

produces a wheel with expected contents, whereas

./pants package //:say-hello

produces a wheel with

dist-info

metadata only. Have I misunderstood how Pants runs the existing

setup.py

?

How does that target graph know what the source file dependencies are? I think you're missing dependencies for "say-hello".

That's my question -- I thought that because there is

setup.py

, Pants will run the

setup()

function -- which does find the packages etc

You are probably forgetting Pants copies all needed files off to a /tmp sandbox before doing anything

I see, this makes sense. So if I want to piggy back on

setup.py

functionality (to find all the packages etc), then I have to make sure I get the whole tree with me as a dependency of

python_distribution

?

So you need:

dependencies=[
  ":setup-py",
  "/target/containing/actual:code",
]

gotcha! Got it working with

python_distribution(
    name="say-hello",
    dependencies=[
        ":setup-py",
        ":MANIFEST",
        "helloworld:lib",
        "helloworld/greet:lib",
        "helloworld/greet:translations",
        "helloworld/translator:lib",
        ],

I wonder if there's a shortcut to refer to all targets located under a directory? I can't use `helloworld::`:

UnsupportedWildcard: The address

helloworld::

included a wildcard (

::

), which is not supported.

😕

That was pretty intentionally never supported since it generally only leads to badness.

Very often you only need to depend on the entry point, because that presumably already depends on everything it needs

Good and supported on CLI, generally bad for BUILD just like import * is generally bad for code.

oh yes, thanks Benjy!

python_distribution(
    name="say-hello",
    dependencies=[
        ":setup-py",
        ":MANIFEST",
        "helloworld:pex_binary"

is enough indeed. Reading the docs, I thought using

pex_binary

won't be enough because its transitive dependencies wouldn't be picked up:

Naively, you might think that a python_distribution publishes all the code of all the python_source targets it transitively depends on. But that could easily lead to trouble if you have multiple distributions that share common dependencies. You typically don't want the same code published in multiple distributions, as this can lead to all sorts of runtime import issues.

With a generated setup.py, Pants partitions your code across the possible dists, so that you don’t have that duplication. With your own setup.py you have to do that yourself, or suffer the duplication consequences…