You can force pip to only use wheels. Then if something fails, build your own wheel in your own (pinned) environment. Could be done in multi-stage docker build,

You can force pip to only use wheels. Then if something fails, build your own wheel in your own (pinned) environment. Could be done in multi-stage docker build, for example. If one of the build deps has no wheel then you're fucked, though. At some level you have to rely on a toolchain.