[Python-ideas] Add citation() to site.py

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 4:33 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 02:51:37PM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > I replied from my cell phone but it bounced (again :-( ). I wrote:
> >
> > """
> > I think this should be in the docs, not in the code. (The reason to
> > have copyright() in the code is purely legalistic.)
> > """
>
> If this is in the code, a possible future enhancement would be for it to
> take an optional module or module name and query that module for its
> preferred citation. That's what R does.

I think it would be premature for the stdlib to try to standardize
machine readable citation metadata for third-party packages, or even a
general API for accessing them. There are a lot of complex issues in
this space that are still being explored by third-party packages like
duecredit:
  https://github.com/duecredit/duecredit

(Notice that the citation() function in R actually does some rather
complicated things and returns a rather complicated object:
  https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/utils/html/citation.html
  https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/utils/html/bibentry.html
)

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org