Support .NET Framework 4.6.1 by Metadorius · Pull Request #2701 · pythonnet/pythonnet

The wheels are a preferred choice. If it's a critical thing, I can of course point uv to git, however, it's more trouble than just pre-built wheels, so I'd be happy if it was available on pypi. For example, uv caching caused issues with tag-based versioning when I was building the packages from source and did a partial fork, which cost me some hours figuring out what the issue was. I am sure there are other hidden nuances like this one.

(I was sure that there's an ability to ship "variants" of a wheel, but turns out it was just extra packages via package[extra] syntax. Not sure if it's possible to have somehting like pythonnet[net461], it looks like not).

Initialize() crash from .NET Framework application #2205 SerializationException when PythonEngine.Shutdown() #2221 Cannot import pandas in pythonnet #2222 python lambda doesn't match expression lambda #2425 seem all to be mentioning 4.6.1 in environment and are past 3.0. Likely not every user submits an issue, yet alone a PR to fix the issue, so I don't think I am the only one; there are probably other users who would benefit from this.

As for the size increase - I checked, and the size seems to be increased from 0.2 MB to 1.6 MB. I feel like on an absolute scale even after increase that's negligible in 2026. Popular packages like numpy, pandas, cryptography are all multple megabytes worth, like 2-10 MB, and I've never heard this to be a problem.