Well, maybe all of us don't think that's a good idea ;-)

But anyway, I would say removing anything *related* to packaging outside the stdlib is a bad idea -- requiring an external tool to build a package is OK, but requireing an external use packages, not so much.

Presumably that's why importlib.metadata exists in the stdlib.

Version is arguably useful from the package user side. As I believe Victor mentioned, there are two uses for version information: display to the user -- for which version strings are fine, or programmatic comparison -- for which something like the Version object is very helpful. Do we only need to use version information programmatically when we are creating (or installing) packages? I don't think so -- I know I have code that (poorly) does version checking programmatically.

-CHB