[Distutils] Immutability of Release Metadata in Warehouse

[Donald Stufft]

> On Dec 19, 2017, at 2:51 PM, Alex Grönholm <alex.gronholm at nextday.fi> wrote:
> 
> Couldn't Warehouse validate the description, and reject the upload (with an appropriate message) if it doesn't pass? This at least would eliminate those ugly project pages that failed to render...there are a lot of them on PyPI.

I forgot to mention that!

So currently the answer is No, because some projects are legitimately not attempting to use rst descriptions and we have no way to know if a project wants a rst description or a plaintext description besides just attempting to render it (which unfortunately also means that projects who want plaintext but which accidentally have something that is valid rst will get rst forced on them).

However! There is a desire to enable Markdown support for PyPI, and as part of that a new metadata field is being added that just indicates what format the description is in (rst, markdown, or plaintext is the supported ones once that field gets added). Once we get that field added and plumbed through, then we’ll have a mechanism by which we can determine if the field is supposed to render correctly, and the plan is to start rejecting uploads that include that field (the behavior if that field isn’t included would be the current behavior) where the description does not correctly render with the selected technology.

So effectively, not right now, but at some point yes, but it’ll be opt-in by adding a new bit of metadata to your project.
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