The Python Packaging Summit Returns to PyCon US
The Python Packaging Summit returns Friday, May 15, 2026 in Room 201A of the Long Beach Convention Center, running 1:45 to 5:45 PM on the Friday of PyCon US. Pradyun Gedam, C.A.M. Gerlach, and Jannis Leidel co-chair again. Attendance is capped and invite-only: submit the attendance form and topic-pitch form by April 30 (AoE). The schedule drops around May 4.
The summit puts the people who build uv, pip, Poetry, Hatch, conda, PyPI, and the major wheel-producing libraries in one room to argue through the year’s thorniest packaging questions. The notes from 2024 and 2025 are the best public window into where pyproject.toml, wheel tags, and lock files are headed.
Carrying over from the 2024 and 2025 summits
The threads below came out of the last two summits and are likely to land back on the table in Long Beach.
Formalizing packaging governance. Barry Warsaw walked the 2025 room through PEP 772, which would create a Packaging Council. The room worked through how to seed initial membership, how to represent communities outside PyPA (Poetry, uv, conda, PyTorch, Linux distros, HPC, downstream redistributors), and whether voting should tie to PSF membership. Carol Willing made the case that packaging consumers, not just tool authors, need a seat. Expect a status update and a concrete bootstrap plan.
Shipping wheel variants. Jonathan Dekhtiar’s WheelNext proposal lets wheels advertise finer-grained compatibility: CPU microarch, GPU, BLAS flavor, MPI build. It drove the most substantive security discussion of 2025. The plugin model runs Python at resolve time to detect the host platform, which Tim and Emma on the Astral side flagged as a tension with reproducible installs driven by a lockfile. Pradyun noted that a frozen variant list fed to the resolver would address that concern. Variants highlight where the scientific-Python and reproducible-application use cases want different things from the same spec.
Building for mobile. Malcolm Smith presented the state of PEP 730 (iOS) and PEP 738 (Android). cibuildwheel has become the de facto cross-compile frontend, and attendees want a shared cross-build abstraction covering Android, BeeWare, and Pyodide. The harder question, how to ship non-Python native dependencies without every wheel vendoring its own libpng, keeps circling back to PEP 725 and conda-forge as a possible source.
Moving Emscripten wheels to PyPI. Hood Chatham’s PEP 783 was accepted on April 5, 2026, bringing Emscripten/Pyodide wheels to PyPI. uv already carries a working branch for cross-installing into a Pyodide venv. Pyodide has shipped an alpha release with a new ABI for packagers to build against, and support is implemented across most of the stack. The remaining piece is a warehouse PR to land the PyPI side. Expect the summit conversation to shift from “whether” to “rollout timeline.”
Mixing static and dynamic metadata. Henry Schreiner is drafting a PEP to let pyproject.toml combine static and dynamic metadata additively, so a project can statically declare most dependencies and let the backend append a pinned Torch version at build time. The scikit-build-core team already ships a dynamic-metadata package other backends can adopt.
Extending PEP 639. License metadata landed. C.A.M. Gerlach is drafting a followup to distinguish project, sdist, and wheel licenses and to allow dynamic additions for cases like vendored submodules.