Permit Project Maintainers to Modify Project-wide Metadata

[leycec]

This feature request is my probably futile attempt to resurrect the acrimonious fist-waving at #2170 into a more general-purpose (and hopefully placid) discussion.

Down a Dark Road

To begin, let's carefully distinguish between the two dissimilar types of metadata warehoused with PyPI projects:

• Release metadata, uniquely associated with a specific release of a specific project. The Warehouse-era policy of prohibiting edits to this metadata is sane. No changes are warranted here.
• Project metadata, uniquely associated only with a specific project. Project metadata generically applies to all releases rather than merely a specific release of a project. The Warehouse-era policy of prohibiting edits to this metadata is not necessarily sane. Changes are possibly warranted here. Project metadata includes:
  • The project homepage URL.
  • The project issue tracker URL.
  • The project author list.
  • The project maintainer list.
  • Arguably, the project description.
  • Arguably, the project long description.

Towards a Friendlier Future

Ideally, Warehouse would permit project metadata to be be arbitrarily modified by project maintainers without mandating that a new release be published merely to do so. The prevailing policy:

• Prevents sanitization of previously published project metadata.
• Promotes unnecessary version churn.
• Violates strict versioning policies (e.g., semantic versioning).

...all of which is demonstrably bad and a substantial regression from the pre-Warehouse PyPI era, which suffered no such deficiencies. @pjeby perhaps best synopsized these concerns in his January 29th, 2018 screed at that same issue:

Conversely, perhaps some of the metadata could be universally allowed to change independently, such as changes in maintainers, support contact, home page, etc.

After all, none of these attributes are really about the release in the first place. They're about the project, and can change independently of the project's releases or lack thereof. (For example, if a project's issue tracker or home page moves, visiting the old page is not useful even if you are working with an older version. Likewise, a URL such as this changing is not really a reason to issue a new release of a project.)

I humbly concur. Cheese wheels for all! 🧀