My feeling is that the PEP covered two different purposes:
- Putting in writing somewhere the common convention that a project virtual environment should be called
.venvand be located in the project directory. - Checking whether pip’s plan to disable installing into the system environment by default had any major flaws.
For (1), I think it’s a worthy goal to try to formulate some “best practices” in this area, so that tools and IDEs can set comfortable defaults. I’m not sure there’s sufficient consensus for this to be a standard, though (PEP 704 doesn’t attempt to do that, to be clear) so I feel that a PEP is the wrong place for such a guideline (much like we wouldn’t try to make the “src layout” for projects a PEP).
For (2), I think it’s clear that pip doing this would cause problems, for conda at least. I’m not sure that the “pip design discussion via PEP” approach was ideal, and I’d be reluctant to use it in future, but it’s got the information that we need. At this point, I think the PEP can be withdrawn or rejected and the pip developers can take the information and decide how to proceed. To be clear, though, I do not think that rejection would imply “pip must not do this” - pip’s feature set is not controlled by PEPs in that way. But withdrawal is probably better to avoid any confusion.