Clarification regarding documentation vs implementation of Authors/Maintainers

[blueninja416]

In the documentation for the pyproject.toml file, it says that you can include multiple authors/maintainers by adding them as extra items into their respective fields like below:

maintainers = ["user1 <user1@gmail.com>", "user2 <user2@gmail.com>"]

However, this only includes the first item in that list. Is this the expected behavior? If so, I think this should be clarified in the documentation. I saw from a couple issues that the core python metadata only supports one of each, however it does support multiple users/emails in the author-email/maintainer-email fields so if it's a bug in the implementation, is it supposed to add those values in those fields instead?

[radoering]

See #7229, especially #7229 (comment).

On the other side there is https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/pyproject-toml/#authors-maintainers which gives some instructions how to fill core metadata so maybe we should implement this.

PS: If anyone knows a package with multiple values in its core metadata, I'd like to see how PyPI displays the authors/maintainers.

[blueninja416]

There's also https://pypi.org/project/histolab/ which displays multiple maintainers in a list.

[radoering]

That's because there is only one maintainer if you download the wheel and open the METADATA file in the .dist-info folder:

Maintainer: Andrei Fajardo
Maintainer-email: andrei@runllama.ai

Same for PKG-INFO in the sdist.

What I'm interested in is what PyPI displays if there where multiple comma separated values in one of the fields. (Since we know that Poetry does not put multiple values there, it has to be a package that is built with another build backend.)

[radoering]

There's also https://pypi.org/project/histolab/ which displays multiple maintainers in a list.

That's better. Now we only need an example for names + e-mails.

[blueninja416]

Looks like that example does use names + emails: https://github.com/histolab/histolab/blob/78c869c4a501c634a811d102d7064c987dc9cae1/pyproject.toml#L8

[radoering]

Yeah, but it uses Poetry and a list of maintainers, so only the first value is in the METADATA file.

[radoering]

Found pypi/warehouse#9400

It seems like PyPI will not display authors/maintainers correctly if we comply with the standard. Since PyPI is big enough to change the standard it might be better to wait for a decision from their side...