alt Hacker NewsIs that what Gentoo is doing here? I thought the whole point of the distro doing any sort of Python packaging is that they can pierce abstractions like virtual environments where it suits them.
(But also: if we’re talking virtual environments then we’re firmly in Python land, not distro land, where the correct answer is “use a wheel” instead of building it yourself.)
The whole point of Gentoo is to build everything directly from source. That means doing whatever the build source tells you to do. It also means not using a pre-built wheel, since that's not source code.
From what I can gather, Gentoo's Python build system does use a virtualenv [1]. Maybe that's not your definition of "distro land", but it appears to be Gentoo's.
It's not clear to me exactly what frontend build tool is used, whether it's one of the well known ones or something that the Gentoo developers coded themselves. However, if it's using a virtualenv, it's going to have to re-fetch the build backend and rebuild it.
[1] https://projects.gentoo.org/python/guide/basic.html