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

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 12:45 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

FWIW, the current draft of PEP 426 has this note:

.. note:

    This section currently mimics the flat layout used in past metadata
    versions. Perhaps it would be better to switch to a different format
    closer to that used for the project URL field::

        "contacts": {
                "author": "\"C. Schultz\" <cschultz at example.com>"
                "maintainer": "\"P. Patty\" <ppatty at example.com>"
            }

So yeah, I'm not particularly happy with the current structure for the
contact metadata either, but it's a *long* way down my priority list
of problems to address in the next draft. (My aim to get that posted
last week proved to be overly optimistic. Because this next update is
the key-value -> JSON-compatible structured metadata switch, it's hard
to post a partial update and still have it even vaguely readable)

Cheers,
Nick.

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