Bernát Gábor's Recap of the 2026 Python Packaging Summit

The 2026 Python Packaging Summit ran on Friday, May 15 in Long Beach. Bernát Gábor’s hour-by-hour recap is the long read; the pre-summit preview is the companion. Worth reading the whole thing if you ship or install Python packages.

The handbook-relevant headlines:

• Wheel 2.0 was restructured into a small core PEP plus optional sub-PEPs, with Zstandard compression as the first sub-PEP. Roughly 25% smaller wheels on the top 1,000 PyPI projects. Broad adoption is years out.
• Mike Fiedler laid out PyPI’s safety math: project creation up 3.1x and upload bytes up 3.5x since 2024, against one funded full-time safety engineer. Trusted publishing adoption climbed from ~10% to ~30%.
• PEP 772 (Packaging Council) was accepted. First elections this fall, aligned with the PSF board cycle, with PSF voting membership required to nominate or be nominated.
• PEP 803 defines abi3t, a stable ABI for free-threaded CPython. A single wheel can target both interpreters via a compound cp315-abi3.abi3t tag.
• Mobile wheels work end to end (cibuildwheel supports Android and iOS) but adoption is small: 11 of the top 360 packages ship Android wheels, 9 ship iOS.

Learn more

• Bernát Gábor’s full recap
• HackMD collaborative summit notes
• The 2026 Packaging Summit Returns to PyCon US (pre-summit preview)
• PEP 777, Wheel 2.0
• PEP 803, abi3t