[Python-ideas] Add citation() to site.py

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 04:54:41PM -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:

> I think it would be premature for the stdlib to try to standardize
> machine readable citation metadata for third-party packages, or even a
> general API for accessing them. There are a lot of complex issues in
> this space that are still being explored by third-party packages like
> duecredit:
>   https://github.com/duecredit/duecredit

Thanks for the link, although that is far and beyond anything that I'm 
suggesting.


> (Notice that the citation() function in R actually does some rather
> complicated things and returns a rather complicated object:
>   https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/utils/html/citation.html
>   https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/utils/html/bibentry.html
> )

Given this, and comments from others (esp. Guido and Nick) I think it 
makes sense to start with documentation. One advantage of changing the 
docs is that it can apply to all versions, not just 3.6.

I've raised a tracker item here: 

http://bugs.python.org/issue26597


Do we have consensus that this should be a separate page in the 
documentation, under "Meta Information"? The only other relevant place I 
think would be a FAQ, except I'm not sure that it is *quite* frequent 
enough :-)

https://docs.python.org/3/index.html (scroll right to the bottom)


Thanks for the feedback from everyone!




-- 
Steve