Using a ChangeLog as a canonical source of package metadata (was: Announce: PyPrimes 0.2.1a)

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 11:06 AM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> I've now produced a small Python library which knows how to transform a
> reST Changelog to package metadata; and how to get that package metadata
> into and out of a Python distribution with Distutils.
>
> The result is that I will never again upload the package with a mismatch
> between what the Changelog claims is the latest version, and what the
> package metadata says.
>
>
> This may be generally useful to others. I'm interested to know how
> people would expect to use this. As an extension to Distutils? As a
> third-party library? Something else?

I can't speak as a package maintainer (because I'm not one), but
speaking as an end user, I'm in favour of anything that guarantees
consistency like that. It's only occasionally an issue, but for
instance, if I clone someone's source code repository and then install
a package from there, it's not necessarily obvious from 'pip freeze'
that I have something that can't so easily be downloaded. If the
Changelog were guaranteed to show that, then I could easily see what's
going on (eg if a new entry is created, immediately after the version
release, adding an alpha version tag).

ChrisA