Wanting a singular packaging tool/vision

[rgommers (Ralf Gommers)]

@pf_moore

So as a serious question - why not work towards that goal now? It may not happen for a long time, but we can make incremental changes, establish standards for new projects, etc? That’s very much the norm, so I don’t see why it couldn’t work for something like this.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that everyone shares your view on the ideal solution (and if you’re looking to standardise on conda-style environments, that will include the core devs, as venv is a stdlib facility) but I’d hope that negotiation and compromise isn’t out of the question here

I think this is very much a desired solution direction. Every other packaging system is busy repackaging lots and lots of pure Python projects, which is a time-consuming and fairly pointless exercise (from first principles, it just has to be done now because dependency solvers). On the other hand, for non-pure projects it’s essential to rebuild them - and those are the ones for which PyPI is problematic by design anyway.

Something like does not have to be, and imho should not be, specific to Conda. It will have to involve some name mapping mechanism anyway for when package names don’t match. For Conda there’s a ~90% match so the mapping is easier, but qualitatively it’s the same thing as mapping to python-pkgname in Debian or py-pkgname in Spack + similar minor name variations for <10% of packages.