would be an option to have zstandard compression for binary wheels dedicated to python-3.14 and higher ?
Are cross-Python-version resolvers like Poetry able to do their resolving without reading the wheels? Can they rely on either PyPI’s JSON API or the separated metadata files? Can they still do that on simpler 3rd party indexes?
If the answer to any of those is no then presumably the answer to any can >=3.14 only wheels use zstd without breaking something question is also no (at least until the offending tools gain some defensive handling of unknown compression formats).
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If the 3.14 is in the name of the binary wheel, you may not neeed to uncompress it to know it’s not for you 3.13 ?
Because pip supports a --python 3.14 flag, a Python 3.14 wheel could need to be read by a copy of pip running under Python 3.13. For example python3.13 -m pip download --python 3.14 foo needs to unpack the foo wheel for Python 3.14 in order to determine what dependencies need to be downloaded.
I just saw that uv now seems to support both normal zip and zstd compressed wheel files by allowing both to be present in the index simultaneously (and using extension .whl.tar.zst for the non-standard compression format). See release notes for version 0.8.15.
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Astral is building their own tool for package registries. That means they can implement non-standard stuff and then make uv work with it. But it’s not standardized, so it won’t work with PyPI.
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