What's the problem this feature will solve?

Some time ago we approved PEP 643, and I intended to implement it... eventually, but it's been a long time and this is actually a very powerful and useful tool for setuptools in particular to implement.

If done correctly, we should be able to silently and in the background start providing reliable metadata for source distributions to anyone building with new versions of setuptools.

Describe the solution you'd like

On the install/wheel building side, we need to be aware that if we are consuming an sdist that already has version 2.2+ metadata, we take all non-dynamic values from the sdist, and not from setup.py. That way if setup.py and the sdist metadata disagree about a given non-dynamic value, the sdist wins (and we are in compliance with the PEP).

For generating PEP 643 metadata (the bigger and more important job, I imagine), there are several implementations (and they can be progressively and backwards-compatibly implemented):

1. The most naïve implementation: mark everything as Dynamic and bump the version to 2.2. (This is not a very useful implenentation, but a valid one).
2. Mark everything as Dynamic if it comes from setup.py, but not if it comes from setup.cfg or pyproject.toml (when [FR] support pep-621 - storing core project metadata in pyproject.toml #2671 is resolved).
3. Add a mechanism to explicitly mark a value as static or dynamic in setup.py — a wrapper like setuptools.literal_value, for when someone needs to generate something from code, but it's deterministic for any given release. We don't have to worry too much about this being inaccurate if we also ensure that when setup.py and the sdist metadata disagree, the final value from the wheel / installed version is taken from the metadata.
4. Add heuristics to parse the AST of setup.py and determine when setup() is passed arguments that we can be sure are deterministic. Literal values, things not assigned in if blocks, that sort of thing. I suspect that even a small amount of this sort of thing will allow us to unlock a lot of currently deterministic metadata that we'll otherwise have to mark as dynamic, e.g. anything with a setup.py that looks like this:

setup(
    name="foo",
    version="0.0.1",
    install_requires = ["attrs"],
)

Alternative Solutions

No response

Additional context

See the discussion on the discourse.

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