Interesting. One of the things that would help with getting people to help and is in the PEPs but last I checked wasn't yet implemented is the metadata that allows putting in all kinds of URLs and the ones I'm primarily thinking of here are the source code repository URL and the issue tracker URL.
I personally sigh when I see a PyPI page that lists its URL as said PyPI page as this seems redundant and not useful and I'd rather see a GitHub or Bitbucket URL (or maybe a foo-project.org or readthedocs URL, but I the repo URL is usually what I'm most interested in). If we had the metadata with all the different kinds of URLs and the tools to show it and search it, then it would be clearer what to put where and would make it easier for consumers to find what they're looking for. Another thought I had while reading your email was the OpenHatch project and if there could be some tie-in with that. It also would be interesting if package maintainers had a channel to communicate with their user base. Back when I was at Yahoo, our proprietary package tool kept track of all installs of packages and stored the information in a centralized database. As a result, a package maintainer could see how many people had installed each version of their package and could send emails to folks who had installed a particular version or folks who had installed any version. A lot of folks used this to warn user bases about security issues, bugs, deprecations, etc. and to encourage folks to upgrade to newer versions and monitor the progress of such efforts. This is a pretty big architectural change of course. I can imagine an easier route could be to have the metadata have a link to a mailing list so a user could easily check a box, press a button, specify an option to pip install, etc. that would subscribe them to a project mailing list, hosted elsewhere. This obviates the need for PyPI/Warehouse to have a big database of who is interested in what by distributing out that responsibility to other tools like Mailman and what not. -Marc http://marc-abramowitz.com Sent from my iPhone 4S > On Apr 11, 2015, at 7:46 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Guido mentioned in his PyCon keynote this morning that we don't currently > have a great way for package authors to ask for help from their user base. > > It occurred to me that it could be useful to have a "Help needed" feature on > PyPI (after the Warehouse migration) where package maintainers could register > requests for assistance, such as: > > * looking for new maintainers > * requests for help with Python 3 support > * links to specific issues a maintainer would like help with > * links to donation pages (including links to Patreon, Gratipay, etc) > * links to crowdfunding campaigns for specific new features > * links to CVs/LinkedIn if folks are looking for work > > Given a requirements.txt file, pip could then gain a "help-needed" command > that pulled the "help needed" entries for the named projects. > > The general idea would be to provide a direct channel from project > maintainers that may need help to their users who may be in a position to > provide that help. It wouldn't need to be too complicated, just a Markdown > field that maintainers could edit. > > In some cases, software is backed by folks that already have a sustainable > support model. For these it could be nice if the Markdown field could be used > to say "Help not needed", and give credit to the people or orgs supporting > them. > > It's not something we can do anything about until after the Warehouse > migration, but I figured I'd mention it while I was thinking about it :) > > Cheers, > Nick. > > _______________________________________________ > Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
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