On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 12:29 PM, Marc Abramowitz <msabramo@gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting. One of the things that would help with getting people to help and is in the PEPs but last I checked wasn't yet implemented is the metadata that allows putting in all kinds of URLs and the ones I'm primarily thinking of here are the source code repository URL and the issue tracker URL.
http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0459/: PEP:459Title:Standard Metadata Extensions for Python Software Packages Version:471651c1fe20Last-Modified:2014-07-02 22:55:34 -0700 (Wed, 02 Jul 2014) <http://hg.python.org/peps/file/tip/pep-0459.txt>Author:Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>BDFL-Delegate:Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> Discussions-To:Distutils SIG <distutils-sig at python.org <distutils-sig@python.org?subject=PEP%20459>>Status:DraftType:Standards TrackContent-Type:text/x-rst <http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0012> Requires:426 <http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0426>Created:11 Nov 2013 Post-History:21 Dec 2013 A JSON-LD context would be outstanding. - [ ] Additional properties for {...} (see RDFJS https://text.allmende.io/p/rdfjs ## Tools Schema)
I personally sigh when I see a PyPI page that lists its URL as said PyPI page as this seems redundant and not useful and I'd rather see a GitHub or Bitbucket URL (or maybe a foo-project.org or readthedocs URL, but I the repo URL is usually what I'm most interested in).
If we had the metadata with all the different kinds of URLs and the tools to show it and search it, then it would be clearer what to put where and would make it easier for consumers to find what they're looking for.
Another thought I had while reading your email was the OpenHatch project and if there could be some tie-in with that.
It also would be interesting if package maintainers had a channel to communicate with their user base. Back when I was at Yahoo, our proprietary package tool kept track of all installs of packages and stored the information in a centralized database. As a result, a package maintainer could see how many people had installed each version of their package and could send emails to folks who had installed a particular version or folks who had installed any version. A lot of folks used this to warn user bases about security issues, bugs, deprecations, etc. and to encourage folks to upgrade to newer versions and monitor the progress of such efforts.
Links to e.g. cvedetails, lists, and RSS feeds would be super helpful. Links to e.g. IRC, Slack, Gitter would be super helpful. Where Links == {edges, predicates, new metadata properties}
This is a pretty big architectural change of course. I can imagine an easier route could be to have the metadata have a link to a mailing list so a user could easily check a box, press a button, specify an option to pip install, etc. that would subscribe them to a project mailing list, hosted elsewhere. This obviates the need for PyPI/Warehouse to have a big database of who is interested in what by distributing out that responsibility to other tools like Mailman and what not.
There are a number of web-based pip management applications. Really, upgrading to Mailman 3 w/ the message archive links auto-appended would also be great. The applications are much broader than just Python packages (eggs, wheels, condabuilds) and pip/peep dependency resolution. (... RDFJS https://text.allmende.io/p/rdfjs ## Tools Schema )