FWIW, I also prefer the 3_10 over 310, for aesthetic reasons.
TBH, I’m very much in the camp of “it doesn’t really matter that much, so someone pick one and we’ll be done with it”. Sooner the better because it’s nicer to have support in “already in the wild” versions, from a rollout/change management perspective (eg: pip had support for PEP 572 before PyPI such that when it was added to PyPI, most users had support for it already — which is nice to have).
I’m happy to update pip and cut a release, whenever we have a decision on this and make an out-of-band release for this, if we’re doing this in 2020 somehow. It’s still in the air who’s gonna be our release manager for 21.0/later for pip, but hey, we’re all reasonable people and I imagine it’d be the similar for all of us.
Apologies for the delay, but recently it has been quite challenging to find the time needed to review everything thoroughly again. As is clear that everyone’s priority is to move forward, I have reviewed everything again carefully and unfortunately, I am rejecting the PEP as I don’t feel comfortable (by the lack of a holistic view of all the side effects on systems and code we are not aware of) accepting it thinking that is clearly the best path moving forward.
As a release manager, I need to advocate for the stability of the release and reduce possible breakage as much as possible and as we have discussed, changes for the wheel tag also has an impact on other aspects that rely on py_version_nodot. It also seems that there is not a clear consensus among core developers that would suggest that the proposal is a clear winner.
The decision may seem disappointing for some folks but please understand that is driven by trying to reduce the end-user pain and confusion given that we don’t know for sure the unintended effects of altering the pattern to py_version_nodot. Also, the PEP may be re-submitted in the future (and maybe there is more consensus by then or other release manager ).
Thank you all for your understanding and thanks to the authors for their effort!
).