Is it possible to avoid useless rebuilds of extensions with pip install -e . ?

[paugier]

My question is related to something that I observed when developing Mercurial.

When I run twice pip install -e ., all C extensions are rebuilt after the second pip call. However, there are no changes in C code corresponding to C extensions and the extensions are already at the right place (in the source tree).

Does this behavior is expected with setuptools? Would there be a way to avoid these useless compilations?

[webknjaz]

Yes, that's expected. Though, you usually don't really need to reinstall unless you want to regenerate the metadata, anyway. So it's already a rare occurrence...

[paugier]

Though, you usually don't really need to reinstall

Thanks for the answer. It seems to me that you need to reinstall each time you modify a C or Rust file, so having a full compilation in such cases is an issue.