Skip to content

Publish sdist for PyPI? #90

Description

@fanzeyi

Hi,

We're packaging a project that depends on cel-expr-python for Homebrew, which builds Python packages from source rather than installing prebuilt wheels. Currently PyPI has only wheels and no dist, so pip install can't build from source. For Homebrew, it is preferred to not use wheels if possible.

Would it be possible to publish an sdist to PyPI alongside the wheels? Thank you.

Activity

  1. dmitriplotnikov commented on Jun 25, 2026

    @dmitriplotnikov
    Collaborator

    Thank you for reporting, @fanzeyi!

    cel-expr-python build uses Bazel. While Bazel can produce artifacts that pip can consume (like wheels), pip install doesn't know how to delegate the build process to Bazel. Because of this, I am not sure it's feasible to publish a working sdist for cel-expr-python at this time.

    Even if we could figure out some clever setup.py to delegate to bazel, installation is likely to fail for many users who don't have the Bazel environment set up, including a supported version of the C++ compiler, leading to a poor experience. PyPI users generally expect pip install to work without needing to install a separate large build system.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Labels

No labels
No labels

Type

No type

Projects

No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions