[Distutils] Author and Maintainer fields in PEP 426 (was Re: PEP 426 is now the draft spec for distribution metadata 2.0)

[Nick Coghlan]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Chris Jerdonek
<chris.jerdonek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 2:10 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Maintainer (optional)
>> ---------------------
>>
>> A string containing the maintainer's name at a minimum; additional
>> contact information may be provided.
>>
>> Note that this field is intended for use when a project is being
>> maintained by someone other than the original author:  it should be
>> omitted if it is identical to ``Author``.
>
> I'm wondering whether Metadata 2.0 can help in rectifying the fact
> that the contents of the Author field are blown away by the contents
> of the Maintainer field when used with current tools (e.g. distutils,
> Distribute/setuptools, PyPI) as described in issues 16403 and 16108,
> etc ([1], [2]).  If backwards compatibility is the issue, maybe
> Metadata 2.0 can help by providing the way forward.
>
> [1] http://bugs.python.org/issue16403
> [2] http://bugs.python.org/issue16108

The core problem is distutils currently only emits metadata v1.1,
which has no separate field for maintainer data. Once it emits v2.0 in
Python 3.4, the upload should indeed provide both pieces of
information, allowing PyPI (and other indexes) to display them more
appropriately (e.g. as "Contact" and "Originally Created By"). I also
agree that with the way the author field is used by distutils,
"Contact" would be a more appropriate label in the index UI than
"Author".

Cheers,
Nick.

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