working with the free-threading configuration begins to reveal that tox is too limiting for our configurations, and per tox developers there is little interest in supporting the "tox.ini" format in favor of their newer toml format, which does not support the environment generation feature we rely upon.   so we are using nox: https://nox.thea.codes/en/stable/ and have already switched dogpile.cache and alembic to this build system.   the integration is being developed with SQLAlchemy/Alembic/dogpile simultaneously so that we can get best practices and features based on this diversity, while also updating all jenkins systems to cleanly integrate with the new methodology.