I may be missing something here. If PEP 600 is accepted, we won’t withdraw the existing manylinux PEPs, nor will we stop maintaining them (as I understand it). Or will we? Can you point me to where in PEP 600 it says that, because I missed it, and it seems pretty significant to me.
I guess what you’re referring to is the idea that manylinux{1,2010,2014} will simply become profiles under the perennial approach, and will be managed as such. But I’m still not clear how much effort that will save - the manylinux2014 stuff I’ve seen going on seems to be happening fine, there’s been a minor tweak to the PEP (around the arm spec, IIRC) that didn’t need any extensive work/debate to land. So I’m still to be convinced that PEP 600 will make a big impact on existing tags.
And yes, I accept that “you need to trust me, I’m the one who’s directly involved in the workload” is a fair response - I know next to nothing about what work is needed on the manylinux infrastructure. But if you want a concrete step to take to move the proposal forward, then explain it to me - and to everyone else, by clarifying the benefits in the PEP so that people can read them and say “yeah, that’s a lot of work being saved”.
Yes, it is. That’s true of any PEP, though - the author has to persuade the community that the proposal is better than the status quo. It’s always “status quo wins by default”.
In this case, I’ve made a commitment that status quo won’t win if that means another manylinuXXXX PEP without PEP 600 having been formally rejected. But equally community response to PEP 600 has been at best lukewarm, and some of the early feedback was honestly pretty negative.
It’s certainly an option 
But I’m extremely reluctant to go down that sort of ultimatum-based approach, even if the current approach is failing.
My view is that the point where an ultimatum becomes real is when someone tries to lobby for a manylinux2019 (or whatever) PEP and I say “nope, you’ve had ages to agree PEP 600, get your act together and do it”). But that’s based on the principle that PEP 600 won’t alter the existing level of work involved in the current manylinux specs.
I know this is probably all obvious to you, but can you give some specifics of some “one-off work” that’s been done recently, that would not have needed to be done if PEP 600 had been accepted instead of manylinux2014? Note the important point here - “would not have needed to be done”, not “would have needed to be done this one last time”. Yes, maybe 2014 introduced an extra iteration of the old-style process, and maybe that means we’ve had to do stuff twice rather than once - but I see the promise of perennial manylinux to be “we do it once more, then never again”,not “we drop a load of unnecessary work that we never needed to do”. And 2014 went in because there was at the time a lot of pressure that it had to go in “right now” because of deadlines. And at the time (before the latest update!) PEP 600 still had a number of unanswered issues. So you can understand, I hope, why I’m averse to rushing a decision on PEP 600 when the only time pressure I can see is that you want to get it agreed “so we can get started on it”.
Yep, so now is the time to work on getting them on board. They should be completely aware that they won’t be able to get away with “we have an urgent deadline” as an argument again. So they need to engage with the PEP 600 discussion if they want a way forward for “next time”.
Actually, suppose I do the opposite? If I threaten to reject PEP 600 due to lack of community interest, what would you do then? (And that is rhetorical, I’m no more intending to threaten you with an ultimatum than I am anyone else).
Here’s a suggestion. Get a list of the people you think should have informed feedback to offer on PEP 600 (include the various people who have commented on this thread). We’ll list them all on the new thread, and explicitly ask for comments from them, as well as any other interested parties. If comments are positive, then good. If people still have reservations, you can address them. If we get no feedback, then rather than outright rejecting it, I’d suggest we defer PEP 600 for a period (maybe 6 months?) with the intention to revisit the discussion then.
I don’t think I can in good conscience accept a PEP if no-one other than its author is willing to explicitly say they are in favour of it.
(OK, I’ll now stop responding to individual points and go re-read the PEP and the mega-thread).