When building Picard with a PEP 517 compatible build system, e.g. when using python -m build, it is currently not possible to pass custom build parameters like --disable-autoupdate.

As distributions are switching the Python packaging to PEP 517 instead of invoking setup.py manually this breaks disabling the autoupdate in distribution packages.

Theoretically something like this should be possible:

python -m build --wheel -C--disable-autoupdate

Picard is using setuptools, and passing arbitrary configuration parameters is not supported there currently, see https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/2491

One solution is to workaround with a custom build backend like it was done in https://github.com/capnproto/pycapnp/pull/328

Or there could be some other mechanism, like e.g. environment variable.

See discussion in https://community.metabrainz.org/t/how-to-invoke-disable-autoupdate-in-rpm-spec/722389/