Though not a language feature per say, I would love if the language would take on the packaging ecosystem and deliver a ground up approach that isn't just a kludge on a kludge on a kludge.
It's not great, but also it isn't terrible, the problem with Python packaging is that there were many ways to do it and people are confused. What's worse, there are tons of articles (in including from PyPA) that are providing bad information.
If you use setuptools and place all your configuration declaratively in setup.cfg it is not that bad.
I've heard people recommend poetry on here as something that is good for package management, but I haven't tried it. Does anyone know of something like that, but also can build your application into a Docker container as well?
Into a docker container as well? The package manager isn't really related to docker though?
Does your container expose ports or need volumes? Does it need gunicorn or uwsgi in front of it? What about system packages? None of those (except maybe the last one) are really in the scope of the package manager.
The main use case is I have a project with a setup.py that has the normal stuff in it, and there's a main entry point in one of the files. I then make a dockerfile that installs that package in a container and runs the main file as the entry point. Ignoring things like ports, it would be nice to emit a standard dockerfile like that, since it's very common.
You might like portage. We have USE flags (which are ./configure --stuff), slots (so you can install multiple versions in a clean way), and any kind of dependency tree you can think of. When I am thinking of upgrading the system python, I can enable the next version and let things simmer for testing (building for py3.7 and 3.8 for example) before I actually throw the switch (eselect python set N).
If you use setuptools and place all your configuration declaratively in setup.cfg it is not that bad.