It gets difficult when you compare scripting languages to natively compiled languages, since some of the terminology is overloaded.
"uv build" makes .wheel files, so it is analogous to "cargo publish" (which makes .crate files) as opposed to "cargo build"
I would call this a packaging tool as opposed to a build system.
cargo publish bundles your source files into a format (.crate) that can be distributed to other developers. This includes instructions for actually building the project at a later time. This is analagous to 'uv build' making an .sdist file.
I guess it gets more complicated with .whl since those can contain build artifacts as well and not just build instructions.
It's true that 'cargo publish' can also upload your .crate files to a remote repository, while uv breaks that functionality out into a separate command called 'uv publish' but I think that's neither here nor there on the difference between bundling the source and building the source.
I would say that `cargo publish` uploading a package to a remote index (like crates.io) is its primary purpose. I've been writing Rust for about 7 years now and I don't think I've ever seen someone use it primarily to generate a `.crate` file without uploading it somewhere.
> "uv build" makes .wheel files, so it is analogous to "cargo publish" (which makes .crate files) as opposed to "cargo build"
This isn't exactly right: `uv build` executes a PEP 517[1] build backend interface, which turns a Python source tree into installable distributions. Those distributions can be sdists or wheels; in this sense, it's closer to `cargo build` than `cargo publish`.
The closer analogy for `cargo publish` would be `uv publish`, which also already exists[2]: that command takes an installable distribution and uploads it to an index.
TL;DR: `uv build` is a proxy for a build system, because that's how distribution construction is standardized in Python. I would not say it's analogous to `cargo publish`, since it's responsible for builds, not publishes.
[1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0517/
[2]: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/package/#publishing-your-pa...