Fair. Individuals have differing opinions. But I don’t think there’s any PyPA policy saying this is out of scope.
Again fair. But I think that “how do people get Python” is part of the question about a unified solution. In much the same way that the “rust experience” isn’t just cargo, it’s also rustup. But just as we can’t assume the SC would be OK with ignoring a chunk of the user base, I don’t think we can assume the SC will accept dropping those ways of getting Python. We can ask, but we can’t assume.
This is where the boundary between packaging (the PyPA) and the SC blurs. I personally think that the SC’s “hands off” approach to packaging puts us in a bad place as soon as we get close to areas where the SC does have authority. Distutils was dropped from the stdlib, and the packaging community had to pick up the slack. We have to address binary compatibility, but we don’t have control over the distribution channels for the interpreter. We provide tools for managing virtual environments, but we don’t control the venv mechanism. We install libraries, but we don’t control the way import hooks work. Etc.
Assuming we don’t want to involve the SC (which is not a foregone conclusion in my view, but doing so would be a much bigger change even than the topic of this discussion), we have to accept that people get Python by means that are out of our control, and declaring such users “out of scope” simply marginalises our impact, and fails to achieve our goals[1].
Or at the bare minimum, my goals
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