My main interest in archiving was from the publisher side, but I’d definitely see it as advantageous for dependency auditing tools to be able to flag when people are still depending on an archived project.
However, from a metadata format point of view, the meta field is NOT the right place to put this info. That field is only for “Read this first” metadata that tells the consuming tools how to read the rest of the metadata.
The only way I could see the meta field being involved is if instead of standardising PyPI’s project states directly, we instead defined the index server equivalent of the tool table we have in pyproject.toml:
- a
meta.api-serverkey with a string identifying the specific API server implementation - a
server-extensionskey in the main body of the response with any server-specific metadata (such as project states)
(I’m not actually proposing that, it’s just an example of a proposal that would legitimately have a claim to adding a new meta key)