Handle the case when a project doesn't have a long description

[dstufft]

When a project doesn't have a description we currently land on a blank pane on the UI. Is this acceptable? Should we switch to a different pane?

[nlhkabu]

I think for the description pane, we should add a default message like "This package does not have a long description. If you are the owner of this package you can provide a description by .".

But for the other panes, we should simply hide them. For example, when there are no downloads, we should hide the download pane and link altogether.

[nlhkabu]

@dstufft I've got a styled solution for this ready to go...

{% if release.description %}
<div class="release-description">
  {{ release.description|readme(format="rst") }}
</div>
{% else %}
<div class="callout-block">
  <p>The author of this package has not provided a project description.</p>
</div>
{% endif %}

The only problem is that when a package description is not available, the code is returning 'unknown' as a string. Should it be doing this? How can I get around it? I'm not keen on string matching for 'unknown' in the template...

[dstufft]

Don't special case UNKNOWN.

There's some history there where distutils would "helpfully" fill in a missing but required value with UNKNOWN which has caused a bunch of UNKNOWN in the database to show up. Warehouse correctly sanitizes out the UNKNOWN values upon new uploads and stores them as NULL or "" in the database (which will show up as None or "" in Python). That leaves the existing packages that still have UNKNOWN in the database, and my plan is once legacy PyPI is gone and no longer able to add more of them into the database, then I'll do a data migration to clean the database of them. This is being tracked by #69.

For now, Warehouse should just treat an UNKNOWN as if someone actually typed that into the description and render it as such.

[nlhkabu]

Ok, thanks for the explanation. Sounds good to me :D

[dstufft]

Is this handled now that #875 is merged?

[nlhkabu]

Yes! 🎉