Perhaps this should just become contact instead?
My instinctive reaction is “let’s not try to add yet-another word to the vocabulary” here.
Taking a few minutes to think about it, I do think that “authors” is a MUCH better name than “contact”, since:
- it corresponds directly to an existing field(s), by name.
- users are already familiar with using this name, for indicating this type of information.
- it is also used in other packaging ecosystems, i.e. consistency with other tooling in this space (this matters for the same reasons that the PEP says we use dependencies instead of a different word there)
- it’s not adding another word to add to further confusion in metadata of “specifying relevant people” (which we all agree needs a cleanup).
I think that the direction we’re taking with this PEP, of keeping a single “authors” field for specifying people is a good one. Notably, this doesn’t lock us out of doing something else later, if we don’t want to go down the “single field, up for interpretation what being in this field means” path.
I’m pretty certain that we’d want to keep the “authors” list regardless of how we go though. Not doing so would be… odd at best. Nearly every Python Packaging tool and tooling in other ecosystems has this field (with this exact name or “author”). I think if we’re deviating from “what everyone in this space is doing”, we should have a decent well-rounded line of reasoning on how we’re different. I don’t see one mentioned here, for using “contact”/“maintainers”/something-else instead of “authors”, so if there’s one, please state it explicitly.
I think there is a lot of nuance/details to discuss here, if we start going into the weeds of “who” all should be specified in a project’s metadata and what that should look like - and that be a can of worms for a separate, dedicated PEP IMO.
The current choice in the PEP is compatible with basically all the directions we might want to take for this metadata declaration in thefuturr (reminder: basically all tooling uses authors) and is (IMO) good enough to move forward until someone finds the time+energy for that other PEP.