[issue6992] Adding a Contributor field in PEP 314

[Antoine Pitrou]

Antoine Pitrou <pitrou at free.fr> added the comment:

> I am bothered that more and more are people constantly jumping on my
> back everytime I try to make Distutils evolves a bit or everytime I
> discuss some feature proposals with the community.

This is not "jumping on your back", this is being skeptical about a
detail that doesn't seem to warrant a change. It is still unknown what
use case the new "author" scheme would solve that the old one doesn't
(does someone want the "author" field to be machine parsable? for what
purpose?), and this bug report itself is quite nebulous (it is unsure
what "doesn't work" since you can put human-readable info about multiple
authors in a single unicode string).
That's why I call it "gratuitous".

> But saying that making the metadata evolve "is not the way we will make
> Python a reliable platform to use and develop for" is completely
> wrong imho.

A metadata system, by definition, has to remain reasonably stable (or be
version-numbered, such that old metadata can be recognized properly).
You can certainly add fields, but replacing existing fields with others
should be sufficiently motivated.

If the ID3 spec was rewritten every five years so that you couldn't read
back the author info from the MP3s you made in 2000, you wouldn't be
very happy :)

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue6992>
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