[Distutils] Simplify 426: Deprecate Author-email and Maintainer-email

[Daniel Holth]

Keep in mind that this is the structured index metadata, which is only
used to grab requirements (for end users, who usually don't need the
other information at all) and used to generate cheese shop web pages.
AUTHORS.txt works when you don't need an automatic "email the author"
button. Or the project's github information etc.

Someday the JSON version of the metadata will certainly make all these
fields a little nicer to parse though.   Maybe

"authors" : [{'name':'bob', 'email':'bob at example.org'}]

The author/maintainer distinction will stay.


On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 11:19 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Having a lot of meaningless options doesn't make meta data any more clear.
>> Well, they are not meaningless, but their role is fully fulfilled by other
>> options (Author and Maintainer fields in this particular case).
>>
>> The use case for the Author field is that if Author wants to be contacted,
>> (s)he leaves email. That's it. This use case should be described in the
>> meta-data along with the format that are expected to be recognized by the
>> software:
>>
>> Author: anatoly techtonik
>> Author: anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com>
>> Author: anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com>, Anything Else for Humans,
>> Or For Future Specs
>>
>> Here the field content defines its type - it's like duck typing for
>> specification, which make specifications more pythonic.
>>
>> Is it good?
>
> Nope. Having a separate field for email makes it clear that you should
> add the email there IMO. However, both author-email and
> maintainer-email are redundant, as is author and maintainer. The
> relevant info is maintainer, to be honest.
>
> //Lennart
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