[Distutils] pip/warehouse feature idea: "help needed"

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 11 16:46:33 CEST 2015


Guido mentioned in his PyCon keynote this morning that we don't currently
have a great way for package authors to ask for help from their user base.

It occurred to me that it could be useful to have a "Help needed" feature
on PyPI (after the Warehouse migration) where package maintainers could
register requests for assistance, such as:

* looking for new maintainers
* requests for help with Python 3 support
* links to specific issues a maintainer would like help with
* links to donation pages (including links to Patreon, Gratipay, etc)
* links to crowdfunding campaigns for specific new features
* links to CVs/LinkedIn if folks are looking for work

Given a requirements.txt file, pip could then gain a "help-needed" command
that pulled the "help needed" entries for the named projects.

The general idea would be to provide a direct channel from project
maintainers that may need help to their users who may be in a position to
provide that help. It wouldn't need to be too complicated, just a Markdown
field that maintainers could edit.

In some cases, software is backed by folks that already have a sustainable
support model. For these it could be nice if the Markdown field could be
used to say "Help not needed", and give credit to the people or orgs
supporting them.

It's not something we can do anything about until after the Warehouse
migration, but I figured I'd mention it while I was thinking about it :)

Cheers,
Nick.
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