This sounds like a very interesting idea. The blog post says
Initially, these features primarily focus on assisting beginners who work on scripts, applications, and projects that don’t require building a wheel file.
That sounds awesome, and is a use case that’s not well supported at the moment. I’d love to see more focus on this from the whole packaging ecosystem, and if this proposal encourages that, then great.
But it does mean that I’m concerned about typing this to the [project.dependencies] key in pyproject.toml, because PEP 621 was created purely on the basis of projects which do target building a wheel[1]. I don’t think it is necessarily the case at all that the existing project metadata specs (PEP 621, and the packaging metadata spec) meet the needs of adhoc scripts, for example.
Maybe we need to cover that here (probably in a separate thread) and get consensus before implementing something in pip that would effectively become the de-facto approach?
Unless there was an implicit expectation - but I certainly only approved the PEP based on that use case. ↩︎