The main reason the importlib_metadata docs include API docs and the importlib.metadata docs do not is because to the best of my knowledge CPython doesn’t have the autodoc extension, so can’t utilize the API docs that are already authored in the code and published in the importlib_metadata docs. I’m disinterested in manually copying the docs from one source to another and then maintaining consistency. If someone could figure out how to add autodoc to CPython, it would be trivial to reflect the API. In lieu of that, the best the user gets is a link to the source where they can read the API from source. If someone is interested in authoring and maintaining separate API docs, that might be acceptable.
These seem like good contributions. If you can make them at importlib_metadata, they’ll get merged into CPython as well.
I find that having such a checklist is a maintenance burden in itself and doesn’t scale to dozens of packages. Having automation might help, although if part of the release process is to manually edit files and commit them to the repository, it becomes difficult to generalize that concept, so most fall back to manual processes.
At least for projects based on jaraco/skeleton, which employ the single sourced version, it’s impossible to have a version mismatched. If tagged with a version, a checkout of that revision, and every version of that package downstream, has that version. It doesn’t matter whether it was tagged and pushed from a checkout or tagged in Github - creating the tag is the release trigger. I’d still like to figure out how to manage better release notes automation and bump inference (what’s the next version based on what changes were made).