On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 05:20:01PM -0400, Andrei Kucharavy wrote: [...] > To remediate to that situation, I suggest a __citation__ method associated > to each package installation and import. Called from the __main__, > __citation__() would scan __citation__ of all imported packages and return > the list of all relevant top-level citations associated to the packages.
Why does this have to be a dunder method? In general, application code shouldn't be calling dunders directly, they're reserved for Python. I think your description of what this method should do is not really coherent. On the one hand, you have __citation__() be a method that you call (how?) but on the other hand you have it being a data field __citation__ that you scan. Which is it? I do think you have identified an important feature, but I think this is a *tool*, not a *language feature*. My spur of the moment thought is: - we could have a script (a third party script? or in the std lib?) which the user calls, giving the name of their module or package as argument e.g. "python -m cite myapplication.py" - this script knows how to analyse myapplication.py for a list of dependencies, perhaps filtering out standard library packages; - it interrogates myapplication, and each dependency, for a citation; - this might involve reserving a standard __citation__ data field in each module, or a __citation__.xml file in the package, or some other protocol; - or perhaps the cite script nows how to generate the appropriate citation itself, from any of the standard formatted data fields found in many common modules, like __author__, __version__ etc. - either way, the script would generate a list of packages and modules used by myapplication, plus citations for them. Presumably you would need to be able to specify which citation style to use. The point is, the *grunt work* of generating the citations is just a script. It isn't a language feature. It might not even be in the std lib (although perhaps we could ship it as a standard Python script, like the compileall module and a few other tools, starting in version 3.8). The protocol of how the script works out the citations can be developed. Perhaps we could reserve a __citation__ dunder as a de facto standard data field, like people already use __author__ and __version__ and similar. Or it could look for a separate XML or TXT file in the package directory. > As a scientific package developer working in academia, the problem is quite > serious, and the solution seems relatively straightforward. > > What does Python core team think about addition and long-term maintenance > of such a feature to the import and setup mechanisms? What does this have to do with either import or setup? > What do other users > and scientific package developers think of such a mechanism for citations > retrieval? A long time ago, I added a feature request for a page in the documentation to show how to cite Python in various formats: https://bugs.python.org/issue26597 I don't believe there has been any progress on this. (I certainly don't know the right way to cite software.) Perhaps this can be merged with your idea. Should Python have a standard sys.__citation__ field that provides the relevant detail in some format-independent, machine-readable object like a named tuple? Then this hypothetical cite.py tool could read the tuple and format it according to any citation style. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
