Compatibility with Briefcase Projects: Support for New Configuration File

[NADOOITChristophBa]

Title: Compatibility with Briefcase Projects: Support for New Configuration File

Issue Description:

I am working on a project using Briefcase and encountered compatibility issues when trying to integrate uv. The main problem arises from the different configurations expected by uv and Briefcase, specifically in the pyproject.toml file.

Problem Description

• Project Structure: Briefcase projects have a specific structure where the pyproject.toml file is located in the root directory. Here's a simplified version of the structure:

  .
  ├── pyproject.toml
  ├── src
  │   └── project_name
  │       ├── __init__.py
  │       ├── app.py
  │       └── ...
  └── tests

• Configuration Differences:

  • Briefcase uses a [tool.briefcase] section in the pyproject.toml file.
  • uv expects a [project] section and a [tool.uv] section for dependencies.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a Briefcase project with the structure mentioned above.
2. Navigate to the project directory and try to run a uv command, e.g., uv add ruff.
3. Observe the error indicating that the pyproject.toml file does not have the expected [project] table.

Error Messages

When running uv add ruff in the project root:

error: No `pyproject.toml` found in current directory or any parent directory

When running uv add ruff in the project_name subdirectory:

error: No `project` table found in: `/path/to/project/pyproject.toml`

Proposed Solution

To resolve this compatibility issue, I propose the following:

• Introduce a New Configuration File: Allow uv to recognize a new configuration file in the base folder that can be used to specify the [project] and [tool.uv] sections. This file could be named uv.toml or similar.
• Configuration Flexibility: Provide an option to configure the location and name of this file, so it can coexist with the Briefcase pyproject.toml without conflicts.

Additional Information

• Command Used: uv add ruff
• uv Platform: macOS
• uv Version: 0.3.3 (deea6025a 2024-08-23)
• macOS Version: [Please specify your macOS version, e.g., macOS Sonoma 14.6.1]

Thank you for considering this feature request. This enhancement would greatly improve the integration of uv with projects managed by Briefcase, allowing for more seamless development workflows.

[freakboy3742]

BeeWare/Briefcase maintainer here. Definitely keen to work with Astral/uv maintainers on anything related to Briefcase integration; the exact form of that integration is the open question.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend adding support for Briefcase's configuration conventions to uv. I'd argue it's likely better for Briefcase to support uv's conventions, and use uv internally. beeware/briefcase#1367 is an existing ticket asking for Poetry support in Briefcase; I imagine the uv-based approach would be similar.

The constraint on this is usually whether the installation tool can support four key features:

1. Platform-specific dependencies (i.e., only install library X if we're installing for platform Y)
2. Support for iOS, Android, and web as recognised platforms.
3. "Host-mode" installation - installing dependencies into a specific target location that isn't the site-packages of the currently running Python interpreter
4. Cross-platform targeting - installing dependencies for a platform that isn't the currently running platform (e.g., installing iOS dependencies when on macOS.

To date, I haven't done any exploration of uv to know the current state of these features. If they already exist, then it might be possible to add uv support to Briefcase.