Those other python builds exist primarily (IMO) because the existing tools were underserving a substantial amount of packages and users. The root causes of that schism should absolutely be in the remit of PyPA, even more so in a discussion that starts with the premise of unification. And previous efforts at such unification have run into that “out of scope” stance pretty verbatim.
Regardless of the fact that this stance is understandable, the goal should IMO be to come up with something that obviates using those other Python builds in the first place, or at the very least gets them to a level of constructive coexistence.
To my mind (and though it’s still too early to tell what other ideas people come up with), the task at hand will be to analyse the set of challenges & constraints (partly summarized in pypackaging-native), and then decide how to solve them and under what umbrella.
For brainstorming about those solutions, I’d really like us not to think in terms of “python.org installers” or “Windows store builds” or “conda”, but in terms of anything that can satisfy the same relevant set of requirements. After that we can iterate on the solution[1] until we have something that gets enough consensus for implementation, but a priori anything should be fair game for change.
needless to say, such a solution must include a sane migration path from here to there ↩︎