Option to vendor dependencies to easy bootstrapping

Would it be possible to have a version of build which vendors its dependencies?

The bootstrap cycle isn’t fun and I’m trying to reduce the number of recipes that we have to build by hand. We’ve a generic ‘pep 517’ building class that uses build and installer but obviously that leads to dependency cycles involving build, installer, pep517, tomli.

I’ve actually bitten the bullet and written a minimal clone of build that vendors pep517 and tomli as a prototype, and considering our scope is smaller (no isolated builds are needed) it’s almost fully functional at 58 lines.

However, I’d prefer not to maintain code. A build which embedded it’s dependencies would be easier for us, and all other source-based distributions.

[layday]

With isolation dependencies are downloaded but not checked. Without isolation (-n) dependencies are not downloaded but they are checked by default. Pass -nx to neither download dependencies nor check them.

[layday]

For Python < 3.11, you’ll also need tomli, but yes, the remaining dependencies are optional.