Consider a build mode that modifies the packaged pyproject.toml

[thrau]

Over a year ago, @silv-io made a suggestion I'd like to investigate, which is to add the entrypoints discovered by plux to the distribution by modifying the pyproject.toml during the build process.

I think this could potentially solve the requirements described in #31 in a neat way, without requiring manually managed files, while at the same time getting rid of build backend specific complexity (like having to copy files during the pip build process). An implementation could look like this:

• introduce a new entrypoint_build_mode (something like "pyproject-compile")
• when running python -m build in the context of the source tree, we assume that we have a .venv with all runtime dependencies installed, so we can safely discover plugins and generate a list of entrypoints
• we add those entrypoints to the the project's pyproject.toml, but not the one in the repo, instead we add it to the file that is copied into the build context by the build backend. typically a build backend will create a new folder with all the relevant files from the project. that one we can augment
• we also overwrite the entrypoint_build_mode flag of [tool.plux] section to manual - this instructs plux to not do any dynamic plugin discovery from there on (like when we create a wheel from a already packaged source distribution)

Basically we're "compiling" a new pyproject.toml from the one in the project + what plux discover finds.

Integrations for build backends may be brittle, since we probably? will probably still have to rely on internals. Or, you could also modify the final zip files. There are a few options where to hook this functionality. But it seems promising.