I agree it would be cool and useful. But it appears to be such a hard problem that modern packaging tools ignore it, preferring to take on other challenges ins

I agree it would be cool and useful. But it appears to be such a hard problem that modern packaging tools ignore it, preferring to take on other challenges instead. My own attempts at extracting Python configuration information to generate a Makefile for personal use (because Makefile understand dependencies better than setup.py) is a mess caused by my failure to understand what all the configuration options do. Given that's the case, when do you think we'll be able to "Remove setup.py files and mandate wheels"? I'm curious on what evils you're thinking of? I assume the need to run arbitrary Python code just to find metadata is one of them. But can't that be resolved with a pyproject.toml which uses setuptools only for the build backend? So you don't need to remove setup.py, only restrict when it's used, yes?