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

[anatoly techtonik]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 6:14 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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)
>

You user story is "contact point". It is quite different from the role of
the author meaning for open source projects. I know at least 5 active open
source projects where people don't like to receive personal email and
prefer to have public tracker or a mailing list as a contact point.

-- 
anatoly t.
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