Description
I have some time at the moment to work on upstream process improvement, and one of the things I'd like to tidy up is the change management process for interoperability specifications. Some relevant previous discussions:
- PyPA, PEPs & BDFL-Delegates: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2015-September/026810.html
- Potentially moving away from PEPs as the primary spec reference URLs: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2015-April/026206.html
- Including more user centric summaries of the specifications in the packaging user guide: Add a "reference" section pragmatically summarising interoperability standards packaging.python.org#151
Since that last discussion, @dstufft, @nlhkabu and @ddbeck have done a lot more design work on Warehouse and the user guide, so I've now come around to the view that the PyPA internal docs are likely to be a better home.
Rather than using PEP 440 or PEP 508 as guinea pigs, I'm thinking a better starting point might be PEP 376 (the database of installed Python distributions), since we can tweak the description on pypa.io to specifically cover the interoperability spec parts that pip implements, and omit the standard library API parts.
I'll put together a pull request along those lines, adding a new "PyPA Specifications" section, with process details (based on the first email linked above), and a section on the RECORD file and the directory naming scheme.