A plea not to use uv-build
A Gentoo Linux user has issued a plea against the adoption of 'uv-build' as a Python build backend, citing excessive build times and portability issues for the distribution. The author argues that the Rust-based tool introduces unnecessary complexity for pure Python packages.
Why it matters
This highlights the friction between modern, high-performance tooling written in systems languages and the maintenance requirements of traditional Linux distributions.
After seeing yet another dozen packages lose keywords on Gentoo because of a single key dependency switching to uv-build , I would like to plea on behalf of Gentoo users: please don’t use uv-build as a build backend. Just to be clear, this is not about uv itself or any other Astral tools; these are good tools with a nice and responsive upstream. The uv-build backend is one thing we have to disagree on. I’m not saying it’s bad; I’m saying that its benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks.
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