Re: [Distutils] Alternate long_description formats, server-side

I can definitely believe there are more important things to do, but some of us aren't versed in the intricacies of what's up top and don't have the familiarity to dive in. Us GitHub plebs are just raring to work on a feature we think is within our grasp ;-) On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 7:35 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

On 2 June 2016 at 15:19, Donald Stufft wrote:

...

On Jun 2, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Nick Timkovich wrote: So yea, we need some sort of standard. It could be as simple as just adding a field to the existing metadata specification with something like:

Description-Format: txt|rst|md|whatever

With the assumption that if you omit the field then we do the legacy behavior of “attempt to render as rst, fallback to plain text”. You’ll probably want a registry of recommended values (or perhaps, mandatory values? How do we add a new type of format to the list?).

Anyways, just an off the cuff idea, but I don’t think there’s anyone seriously opposed to the idea.

Yep, it's not about opposition, just a matter of there being a range of more important problems ahead of it in the priority queue.

That said, we do now have a mechanism to document additional metadata fields without requiring an entire new metadata version (see Provides-Extra in https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/#core-metadata for an example), and there's a catalog of anticipated formats in https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0459/#document-names, so the idea of defining a Description-Format field sounds plausible to me (even if it takes a while for tools to start emitting or reading it).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia