I am so, so happy to see this discussion and this PEP. This is what I should have done after the Packaging Summit at PyCon 2019. Thanks for making that discussion (among many others!) into such a nice spec, @pradyunsg and @rgommers .
What can I do to help move this forward? It seems like perhaps a prototype implementation could live in Grayskull, as a translator from the package metadata here into the Conda ecosystem equivalent metadata. Is that a helpful exercise?
My interest is more than Conda, though. I’m now employed by NVIDIA on their RAPIDS team, which at one point dropped wheels as a distribution mechanism. There is customer demand to not require Conda, however, so wheels are supported, but their size is presenting the usual problems with distributing something so large. We want to support shared libraries and distribute only our specific bits, rather than having to bundle all of our dependencies.
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own, not NVIDIA’s, but I am making efforts here in the hopes of making NVIDIA software easier to install.