I agree that figuring out the wheel/sdist relationship is crucial here. It seems like how wheels are connected to sdists in these variant cases is intimately related to Enforcing consistent metadata for packages. Some of the considerations raised by @rgommers here are particularly pertinent. If variants are different wheels with the same distribution and come from the same sdist, completely static sdist metadata may not be sufficient to capture the requirements of the different wheels built from that sdist. Concretely, to Oscar’s list above I think we would need to augment point 5 with “when building a particular variant from the sdist, it must be possible to modify additional metadata (such as dependencies) for the wheel”. I just want to make that explicit.
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