Thanks everyone for the renewed discussion! I’ve been mostly unavailable for the last few months, but plan to become more actively involved again. Before responding to specific points (which I’ll do in follow-up replies), I wanted to share some thoughts on how I think we should proceed in general.
The idea in PEP 771 has now been discussed over nearly six years — starting with Jonathan’s original thread in August 2020 (which itself referenced a setuptools issue from 2017), through three rounds of PEP discussion, and involving many people across the packaging community. I think there is by now a reasonable understanding of the trade-offs involved, even if not everyone agrees on how to weigh them.
Over the course of this discussion, different approaches have been suggested — most significantly, having recommended extras be opt-in rather than opt-out. However, I think it’s important that this PEP continues to represent the opt-out approach that it was designed around. This is what a significant number of people in this and previous discussions have expressed a desire for, and it is what the PEP was written to propose.
If the opt-out approach is ultimately rejected, that would at least give a clear signal to the community, and would leave the door open for a separate PEP proposing an opt-in or metadata-only approach. In other words, I think it would be a mistake to water down this PEP into something substantially different just to avoid a rejection — better to have a clear decision on the idea as proposed.
That said, there are of course improvements we can and should make to the PEP based on the discussion here, and this is what I plan to focus on going forward.