alt Hacker NewsYou pretend not to understand what "packaging" means. No, it's not just the format description, even though the format description incorporates useless fields that are designed specifically to help setuptools to overcome the problems they created for themselves (all the "Dynamic" stuff is worthless otherwise).
Packaging, in this context, means a unified interface that describes to the tool what needs to happen to the source code in order for it to be transformed into a binary package. There are about a dozen tools that can package Python binary modules, setuptools, SWIG, bind11 and so on. Each does it in a completely different way. In practice, if you want to build the packages now available on PyPI, you will not be able to come up with a single tool that can build every one of them, probably, not even half of them.
All this talk about standardized metadata is worthless because of what actually goes into the package. The metadata is the least of your problems when packaging Python code.
> In practice, if you want to build the packages now available on PyPI, you will not be able to come up with a single tool that can build every one of them, probably, not even half of them.
This is the entire point of build backends, and is no longer true/hasn’t been true for several years. Build backends are not perfect, but they are the reason you can run `uv add` or `pip install` and get a functional wheel from an sdist on PyPI regardless of whether the sdist contains Python, C++, Rust, or anything else.
(This is now the second time you’ve imputed dishonesty in a conversation where I’ve tried to be helpful. So this will be my last response.)