Look, I'm not trying to sell this as a full solution - I'm just trying to establish that a lot of people really don't need a full solution.
>only works on the exact same Python version
It works on any Python version that all of the dependencies work on. But also it can be worked around with environment markers, if you really can support multiple Python versions but need a different set of dependencies for each.
In practical cases you don't need anything like a full (python-version x dependency) version matrix. For example, many projects want to use `tomllib` from the standard library in Python 3.11, but don't want to drop support for earlier Python because everything else still works fine with the same dependency packages for all currently supported Python versions. So they follow the steps in the tomli README (https://github.com/hukkin/tomli?tab=readme-ov-file#building-...).
>on my machine
(Elsewhere in the thread, people were trying to sell me on lock files for library development, to use specifically on my machine while releasing code that doesn't pin the dependencies.)
If my code works with a given version of a dependency on my machine, with the wheel pre-built for my machine, there is no good reason why my code wouldn't work on your machine with the same version of the dependency, with the analogous wheel - assuming it exists in the first place. It was built from the same codebase. (If not, you're stuck building from source, or may be completely out of luck. A lockfile can't fix that; you can't specify a build artifact that doesn't exist.)
This is also only relevant for projects that include non-Python code that requires a build step, of course.
>assuming no dependencies have published new packages.
PyPI doesn't allow you to replace the package for the same version. That's why there are packages up there with `.post0` etc. suffixes on their version numbers. But yes, there are users who require this sort of thing, which is why PEP 751 is in the works.