[BUG] Cannot specify build directory in bdist_wheel

[rossburton]

setuptools version

72.1.0

Python version

3.9

OS

Linux

Additional environment information

No response

Description

To ensure clean builds, we want to build python modules with a fresh build directory:

$ python3 setup.py build -b /a/fresh/directory

However, we can't then use this build tree with bdist_wheel as there's no option to specify where the build tree is when using --skip-build:

$ python3 ./setup.py bdist_wheel -b /a/fresh/directory --skip-build
running bdist_wheel
installing to /a/fresh/directory
running install
running install_lib
warning: install_lib: 'build/lib' does not exist -- no Python modules to install

Yes I know invoking setup.py is deprecated but there's no way to pass -j to build...

Expected behavior

bdist_wheel has an option to tell is where the build tree is.

How to Reproduce

$ python3 setup.py build -b /a/fresh/directory
$ python3 setup.py bdist_wheel -b /a/fresh/directory

Output

warning: install_lib: 'build/lib' does not exist -- no Python modules to install

[abravalheri]

You can try setting up the relative fields in setup.cfg for the [build] and [bdist_wheel] sections.

Please note that using setup.py as a CLI tool is deprecated (since the implementation of PEP 517, setup.py is only seen as a configuration file, not as a CLI), so it no longer receives the same level of support of other functionalities (or feature requests).

[rossburton]

My goal is to do this for all packages we build, I just discovered DIST_EXTRA_CONFIG and it appears that setting it to a file like this does the right thing:

[build]
build_base = /my/build/path

This appears to be the only way to set the build directory when using a pep517 build tool?

[abravalheri]

Yes, in the current state of implementation of setuptools that should work.