Use pyproject.toml to specify build-system and dependencies

[jakobkukla]

Hi again :)

As I said in the other discussion, I'm currently trying to package Yamtrack for Nix/NixOS. Packaging python applications in general is much easier if upstream uses pyproject.toml with a build-system like setuptools to describe how a project is build and add some metadata. It also allows to neatly specify package dependencies in the same file. Yamtrack currently uses requirements.txt to do so. If you are interested, I could also contribute this change.

There are some open questions though:

• Which build-system to use? Generally, I would suggest using setuptools with setuptools-scm as it is widely used and pretty much does everything automagically without additional configuration (like adding non .py files like templates and json to the package).
• You currently use your requirements files to do some basic dependency locking. While this would also be possible with pyproject.toml, fixing dependency versions (==) in it is disregarded. One would generally rather define a range of working versions or a minimum version. This is also relevant for package managers (including Nix) as package repositories seldomly ship the exact versions a package might use (e.g. beautifulsoup4 wasn't updated to 4.14 in nixpkgs yet).
• Locking could be achieved by using one of the established python package managers (like uv or poetry). There is also the newly standardized PEP 751 which brings native locking support to pip. It is still experimental currently, but I think it's safe to say this will be the way forward. :)

What do you think?

Thanks!

[FuzzyGrim]

I'll have to look into it further, but I think migrating to pyproject.toml and uv is a good idea. Paperless-ngx is a very popular self-hosted application, also developed with Django; perhaps we could do it the way they do.

[jakobkukla]

Sure! uv is probably a good choice while the pylock.toml implementation is maturing. Are you ok with me opening a PR? :)

[FuzzyGrim]

Yes!