[Catalog-sig] New fields in the Metadata for PyPI

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> 2009/12/2 "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de>:
> [..]
>> For Python, it somewhat unfortunate that there is a tradition of
>> "newest documentation". When the documentation format changed, many
>> URLs broke - something that would not have happened when all URLs
>> had been versioned.
> 
> Are you suggesting that packages.python.org should be versioned ?

No, I wasn't talking about packages.python.org at all, but about
docs.python.org. For packages.python.org, it's up to the individual
package to support versioned documentation.

> Hold on... marking the old versions as hidden is the default PyPI behavior.
> You have shown a specific example here.
> 
> If you upload new versions, previous ones will be hidden by default,
> and we are landing on the newest version. That's the vast majority of
> the projects at PyPI
> AFAIK.

For packages that have only one (visible) release, the whole discussion
of whether meta-data are per-package or per-release is pointless,
anyway. This is the simple case, and we can resolve it either way.

>>> that should be enough for all projects : they can point in their own
>>> documentation to older documentation.
>> I'm not sure package authors would like that.
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean.
> 
> AFAIK the new "packages.python.org" is not versioned: if I upload a
> doc, the previous
> one is gone.

That's completely up to you. If the new zip file contains the
documentation of all versions, you get multi-versioned documentation.
See, for example,

http://packages.python.org/zc.async/

> On the long_description front, the default behavior is to display the
> latest one

That's not true. If there are multiple visible releases, no release
is singled out.

> See that page : http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute  (that's the
> way most projects are presented)

That's because distribute has only one visible version. Just unhide
one of the older releases.

It would probably better if this URL redirected to

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute/0.6.8

>     I have suggested that we should mark in the PEP some fields are
> being per-project, and let
>     PyPI display them on every pages related to that project.

And I'm fine with that, except that I believe that a documentation URL
(if supported) probably should be per release.

Regards,
Martin