The --build-dir options doesn't work for local archive installs

[hetmankp]

When installing from a local archive, the --build-dir option is ignored and instead a temporary directory is always used.

As far as I can tell this is decided in req.py, in InstallRequirement.build_location(), where the value supplied by --build-dir is only taken into consideration if self.req is not None. I'm not really sure what self.req is meant to represent so I can't submit a patch at this time (or decide if this is expected behaviour in some way).

Thanks for your feedback.

UPDATE: #1831 fixed this for wheel archives. the problem remains for local sdist installs.

[qwcode]

the parsing currently doesn't try to determine a "project name" just from a archive file alone, so therefore doesn't create a build dir using the name it didn't parse, but rather uses a tmp dir.

in most cases it should/could parse something I think. btw, the new project distlib has a good function for this: https://bitbucket.org/vinay.sajip/distlib/src/a586fab287abc1f34d1d5e251ef20ae19d1ad51e/distlib/util.py?at=default#cl-521 (@vsajip, what's the origins of this function and supported scope?)

for now though, a workaround is to install from the local archive using ---find-links like so:
(assuming it's using standard naming)

pip install --no-index --find-links=file://path/to/archive/dir/ name==version

[vsajip]

@vsajip, what's the origins of this function and supported scope?

IIRC I wrote it for distlib. I would have thought there'd be similar functions in setuptools/distribute/pip. I use it in my pypi/simple scraping code - isn't there an equivalent in pip.index?

[qwcode]

there's an equivalent that assumes you have a project name to use in parsing, but nothing that just parses in the abstract. btw, I'm using your function in a project at work. could pip just grab this w/o trying to use distlib for now?

[vsajip]

could pip just grab this w/o trying to use distlib for now?

Sure, as long as you pass back any improvements you make ;-) Just kidding, but it would be nice if you did.

[qwcode]

my concern is to be clear what version schemes it's supposed to work for or not work for.... corner cases that fail, or work, but shouldn't etc.... I certainly pass back clarity/fixes related to that.

[vsajip]

It's meant to be version-scheme agnostic. The version part will match any sequence of alphanumerics, underscores, period, plus and minus, which should cover most sane version numbers. I have been thinking about changing the regex so that project name components can't have '-' - at the moment it allows 'my.project.name' or 'my-project-name', but that won't work in the case where version is e.g. 'latest-0.9' and the composite is 'my-project-name-latest-0.9', unless a project name is passed in.

Although setuptools/distribute convert '-' in project names to '_' in file names of corresponding distributions, I don't think distutils does, so there are ambiguous filenames out there AFAIK.

[qwcode]

leaving open; we should update the --build help text to explain this.

[qwcode]

adding an important comment from #2060 (#2060 (comment) )

"even if it uses the temp build directory, there's no rationale for --no-clean to be ignored"

[rgommers]

The cause of this issue as well as related ones like gh-3171 seems to be that the options dict is simply ignored when calling WheelBuilder here: https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/develop/pip/commands/install.py#L288

[dstufft]

Closing this, with #4371 we're going to be deprecating/removing the --build option.

[jdemeyer]

Please reopen, this issue still remains.

[jdemeyer]

I'm not sure what "local archive installs" in the title means here, but at least --build is not supported when installing from a local directory:

$ pip install --verbose --upgrade --build=/tmp/pip .
Processing /home/jdemeyer/math/cylinder/src
  Running setup.py (path:/tmp/pip-hyhaPT-build/setup.py) [...]