[Distutils] PEP 345 - 3 new fields

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>> > [having the changelog in the package metadata] might be good, if the
>> > changelog was in a separate file. It's quite commonly a very long
>> > text file, as it retains the change history of the code base
>> > indefinitely.
>>
>> Yes, and if it's reStructuredText based, we will be able to do what
>> people do actually, by integrating a reST-based CHANGELOG file at the
>> end of long_description:
>
> Let's not get ahead of ourselves :-) Asking developers to declare where
> their changelog file is will be much easier to get than asking them to
> change the format of that file.
>
> Stick to a simple standard of “this file contains the changelog”, which
> will let people simply move their existing changelog of whatever format
> into that file. Having it in a predictable location would be a big step
> forward, and an easy one to enforce.
>

That doesn't differ from what we have today with long_description:

"""
Description (optional)

    A longer description of the package that can run to several
paragraphs. Software that deals with metadata should not assume any
maximum size for this field, though people shouldn't include their
instruction manual as the description.

    The contents of this field can be written using reStructuredText
markup [1]. For programs that work with the metadata, supporting
markup is optional; programs can also display the contents of the
field as-is. This means that authors should be conservative in the
markup they use.
""""

IOW, Changelog would be a similar field in the metada, meaning that a
simple text works too

Regards,
Tarek