Martin v. Löwis wrote:
[snip]
Of course often updating the long description is an alternative to doing
so. But this would have been quite a bit more work than placing a
comment; the long description of this package is generated by setup.py
of the package, and it'd meant having to check out the package and doing
a new description upload. I just wanted to spend a minute to provide
helpful information.
Assuming your comment wasn't actually removed, this specific need would
go away, right?
Yes, though I must say I spent quite a few minutes hunting through the
user interface to try to figure out how I could add a new comment until
I figured out it would only work for those packages I am not a
maintainer of. :)
Notice that you don't have to run the complete upload process again if
you want to edit the long description - you can easily do that over the
web page as well.
I know that, but then the information will be lost next time I do an
upload, unless I also add it to the version control system too. I don't
want to maintain information in two places if I can avoid it.
[snip]
"If you want to comment on this package, please use the following forum:
<mailing list address or http link>."
Now, *that* is something that I would consider appropriate for
long_description.
I think this goes more into a discussion about metadata. Author email
and a mailing list or forum address should be separate categories. But I
think I need to take that up in the distutils-sig.
Notice that the comment facility in PyPI is quite different from posting
to a mailing list. The audience for the mailing list are
developers/authors of the package, and current users. The (intended) use
of the PyPI commenting facility is to address prospective users of the
package, which want to know whether the package is any good.
True.
Though in reality these use cases flow into each other:
* see whether a package is any good
* reading the mailing list
* feedback to the authors.
But perhaps there's a better idea than that: it would be useful to
provide a "feedback" functionality for a package. This is separate from
comments: comments are meant to be read by others. Feedback is supposed
to go to the package maintainers but doesn't need to be shown.
Again, that's (yet) another feature - messages that are primarily
addressed at the package authors.
I'm not sure many package authors would like that (and the poll
indicates that the option "mail to package owner only" receives
little interest). They either have bug reporting and support channels
already, or they would prefer to get such messages in direct email;
some may not want to be bothered with package feedback at all.
But since the package owners do get these messages now too, they'll
undoubtedly be used as a feedback mechanism as well.
Regards,
Martijn
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