I think, practically speaking, there isn’t a good way for the PyPA to bless a singular tool in a way that people will actually recognize it as “the” tool to use. Mechanisms I can think of for doing so:
- Bundle it with Python, deprecate the bundled pip.
- Create a marketing campaign on PyPI, mailing lists, Twitter, etc promoting the use of some hypothetical tool.
- Something else?
More fundamentally though, I don’t think that such a tool exists currently. There are a number of tools that could maybe be it, but nothing out of the box. To be honest though, I’m not even sure that such a tool could exist.
This is a lot more complex of a problem for Python than any of the “better” ecosystems, because Python’s packaging toolchain currently attempts to solve a much larger and harder problem than those “better” ecosystems do.
I also think that the survey isn’t a great way to determine if this is what we should be focusing on either, since it doesn’t provide any context or trade offs involved in achieving that goal. I suspect that 100% of the users that want a unified tool, just blindly assumed that whatever their preferred workflow, or something like it, would of course be included in that tool, and they don’t consider that they might have to make drastic changes to their workflow to get it-- but somebody is going to have to make drastic changes, because the reality is what exists now in the world are so varied that a singular tool can’t possibly solve them all IMO.