Publish pure Python wheel to PyPI or pin a build backend version

[edgarrmondragon]

With the recent ecosystem-side breakage (now reverted) caused by setuptools, which affected this package (see #171), I found that there are no wheels published to PyPI¹:

This is a problem, because it means dependents need to install the package from a source distribution (i.e. a .tar.gz file), which invokes the build backend. Since this projects uses setup.py, that build backend is detected by installers like pip to be the latest setuptools, which led to the above mentioned issues for this package and others.

I offer two, not mutually exclusive, improvements.

Publishing wheels²

Publishing wheels means that installers will use that and no calls to setuptools will need to be made.

Building wheels is really easy:

• Invoking setup.py (which is now deprecated³):

  python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel

• Using pypa/build in the project root

  python -m build

Use static metadata and pin setuptools

Another option is to use a pyproject.toml⁴ with a build-system table to pin a version of setuptools known to work with the project's configuration:

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools==77.0.0"]
build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"

Cheers!

Footnotes

1. https://pypi.org/project/singer-python/#files ↩

2. https://pythonwheels.com/ ↩

3. https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated.html ↩

4. https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/userguide/pyproject_config.html#configuring-setuptools-using-pyproject-toml-files ↩

[edgarrmondragon]

Goes without saying that I'm happy to submit a PR for Use static metadata and pin setuptools, if that's the preferred approach.