[Distutils] PyPI changelog support, releases.json / common NEWS.rst format?

[mario at include-once.org]

I'm currently tinkering on a freshmeat substitute. And for automating
release announcements been looking around for common package meta
data schemes. PyPIs /pypi/pkgname/json (or the xmlrpc interface) looks
quite interesting. It obviously mostly targets dependency management
and systemic categorization.

So from googling around this never came up: But would it be feasible
to include a version changelog / release summary via du.register?

Of course, I'm referring to a human-readable "This version adds and
fixes..." changelog, not the (name, version, timestamp) journal tuple.

The releases{} per-URL `comment_text` seems widely unused.
Was that its purpose?


I hope this isn't getting too off-topic, this is -just for comparison
and context- what I'm intending to eventually map PyPI release streams
onto:
   http://fossil.include-once.org/freshcode/wiki/releases.json


There are probably other priorities for distutils / warehouse
currently. So alternatively, is there a semi-standard for NEWS.txt
or CHANGELOG etc. files within Python packages?

Cheeseshop project homepages which also include a release notes list
via `long_description` seem far and few between. I actually found
just one:
   https://pypi.python.org/pypi/py-translate
Which seems to share a reStructuredText source for documentation and
pypi homepage:
   https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jjangsangy/py-translate/master/HISTORY.rst

(I'd have presumed Markdown-style release notes to be favoured.)
Anyway, is there an estimate on how many packages include release
notes at all?