I’ve been talking from the perspective of replacing pip’s requirements files. I personally never got into application distribution ala Briefcase. Worrying about distributions somehow is an expansion of what this topic was originally about, stemming from, I think, the analogy to wheels and how this is all meant to be a different use case.
I personally just want a way to write down the requirements my code has in order to run. People objected to reusing the [project] table back in A look into workflow tools - package management in the Python extension for VS Code because it felt like a re-purposing of [project] for something it wasn’t meant for. This discussion got split off to try and come up with something separate from [project] for this use case of replacing pip’s requirements files.
I proposed a simple strawman idea in Projects that aren't meant to generate a wheel and `pyproject.toml` - #56 by brettcannon . Some people didn’t like the suggested table and key names, so a slightly tweaked alternative was also proposed by me. I think the only other proposal is from @h-vetinari at Projects that aren't meant to generate a wheel and `pyproject.toml` - #81 by h-vetinari .
Unfortunately, even after taking the time to write a blog post to try and motivate why I didn’t think reusing [project] was necessarily the right thing, I’m still spending most of my time trying to clarify this point. That tells me that either I’m personally failing horribly at explaining all of this or the concept is just not clear enough on its own to explain in general and thus the idea should just be dropped due to difficulties in teaching it.
I was hoping this could all get resolved before I needed to make a decision about those PEPs to potentially help inform what PEP 723 would want embedded a single-file script. But if that’s simply not going to happen then so be it as I’m not holding up making a decision about those PEPs for this because if we aren’t heading towards consensus/decision after 87 posts and a month of very active discussions then we might not ever come to a conclusion here and thus status-quo wins.