[Distutils] Alternate long_description formats, server-side

[Nick Coghlan]

On 3 Jun 2016 4:03 am, "Donald Stufft" <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
>
>> On Jun 2, 2016, at 9:16 PM, Nick Timkovich <prometheus235 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>>
>> I can definitely believe there are more important things to do, but some
of us aren't versed in the intricacies of what's up top and don't have the
familiarity to dive in. Us GitHub plebs are just raring to work on a
feature we think is within our grasp ;-)
>>
>
> Yup! Nick was speaking to why folks like myself haven’t done it yet- If
some enterprising person (perhaps you!) takes the time to write up a PEP
and work it through the process, then there’s no reason to wait for me (or
Nick, or any of the other core team) to do it :)

Right, the key part of my post is the second paragraph: we actually now
have a relatively simple mechanism to capture proposals like this one,
which is issues and pull requests against the "specifications" section of
the Python packaging user guide on GitHub.

Previously a key sticking point was not having a way to document added
fields without a full PEP, which imposed way too much overhead for adding a
simple attribute like Provides-Extra or the Description-Format field being
considered here.

For this to work, I think the concrete changes you would need would be:

- Python packaging user guide to document the new field in the core
metadata spec
- setuptools to support setting it
- Warehouse to respect it for all defined rendering formats
- potentially legacy PyPI to support respecting it at least for
reStructured text and Markdown (treating others as plain text)
- PyPUG again to provide usage docs once the default tools support it

Cheers,
Nick.

>
>
> —
> Donald Stufft
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