On 29 June 2018 at 12:14, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 2:25 PM, Andrei Kucharavy > <andrei.kuchar...@gmail.com> wrote: >> As for the list, reserving a __citation__/__cite__ for packages at the same >> level as __version__ is now reserved and adding a citation()/cite() function >> to the standard library seemed large enough modifications to warrant >> searching a buy-in from the maintainers and the community at large. > > There isn't actually any formal method for registering special names > like __version__, and they aren't treated specially by the language. > They're just variables that happen to have a funny name. You shouldn't > start using them willy-nilly, but you don't actually have to ask > permission or anything.
The one caveat on dunder names is that we expressly exempt them from our usual backwards compatibility guarantees, so it's worth getting some level of "No, we're not going to do anything that would conflict with your proposed convention" at the language design level. > And it's not very likely that someone else > will come along and propose using the name __citation__ for something > that *isn't* a citation :-). Aye, in this case I think you can comfortably assume that we'll happily leave the "__citation__" and "__cite__" dunder names alone unless/until there's a clear consensus in the scientific Python community to use them a particular way. And even then, it would likely be Python package installers like pip, Python environment managers like pipenv, and data analysis environment managers like conda that would handle the task of actually consuming that metadata (in whatever form it may appear). Having your citation management support depend on which version of Python you were using seems like it would be mostly a source of pain rather than beneficial. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
