[Distutils] Provide separate development and documentation URLs in PyPI metadata?

John Thorvald Wodder II jwodder at gmail.com
Sat Jun 24 13:43:12 EDT 2017


On 2017 Jun 24, at 13:34, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> When you go to PyPI.org for a project you will find a link to the "homepage". Now for some projects that's their development site, e.g. GitHub URL. For others it's their documentation site, e.g. Read the Docs. And not all projects link to both from their PyPI page (e.g. yesterday I noticed flit didn't directly link to its doc site, although Thomas fixed this when I pointed it out).
> 
> So my question/idea is if it would make sense to have separate, explicit development and documentation URLs in the PyPI metadata? For me that would make a project's PyPI page a true homepage as I would know that no matter what I could find where it's developed or where the docs are by going to PyPI. This compares to now where either I gamble and go to PyPI in hopes the developer provided the link there or hope I craft the right search on Google (which based on my search yesterday for [Sphinx makefile] shows I don't always succeed at).

The package data exposed by PyPI's JSON and XML-RPC APIs already includes a "docs_url" field; however, this seems to only ever be set for projects whose documentation is on http://pythonhosted.org with no way to point it to other domains.  PEP 345 defines a Project-URL field[1] that could be used to tell PyPI where documentation is hosted, but I'm not aware of a single tool that does anything with or even lets you set that field.

[1]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0345/#project-url-multiple-use


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