[Distutils] Alternate long_description formats, server-side

[Nick Coghlan]

On 2 June 2016 at 15:19, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> On Jun 2, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Nick Timkovich <prometheus235 at gmail.com> wrote:
> So yea, we need some sort of standard. It could be as simple as just adding
> a field to the existing metadata specification with something like:
>
> Description-Format: txt|rst|md|whatever
>
> With the assumption that if you omit the field then we do the legacy
> behavior of “attempt to render as rst, fallback to plain text”. You’ll
> probably want a registry of recommended values (or perhaps, mandatory
> values? How do we add a new type of format to the list?).
>
> Anyways, just an off the cuff idea, but I don’t think there’s anyone
> seriously opposed to the idea.

Yep, it's not about opposition, just a matter of there being a range
of more important problems ahead of it in the priority queue.

That said, we do now have a mechanism to document additional metadata
fields without requiring an entire new metadata version (see
Provides-Extra in
https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/#core-metadata
for an example), and there's a catalog of anticipated formats in
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0459/#document-names, so the idea
of defining a Description-Format field sounds plausible to me (even if
it takes a while for tools to start emitting or reading it).

Cheers,
Nick.

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