Checklist

• I added a descriptive title
• I searched open requests and couldn't find a duplicate

What is the idea?

We would like to add better support to the rattler library for working with packages from PyPI. Much of this functionality exists the rip project, but because this is no longer being actively developed, we would like to bring it over to the rattler project.

Why is this needed?

Another project that could provide this functionality in Rust is the uv project, but unfortunately the crates that provide it are not available on crates.io and we're not sure if they ever will be made available there.

To continue publishing the rattler crates on crates.io, we need to ensure that all of its dependencies are available there.

We also need this crate to fill in the gaps for pypi interoperability. For example, the rattler_lock crate is currently unable to create lock files with pypi packages using components exclusively available from rattler. This is a bad developer experience, and we would like to fix it.

What should happen?

We should first focus on bringing components from the rattler_installs_packages crate to a new create in rattler called rattler_pypi_interop.

Additional Context

See original discussion surrounding this issue here:

• [Discussion] Native PyPi/Pip package support #833