Plain text pypi description formatting: possible cause¶

Tags: python

Sometimes projects have a plaintext description on pypi.org. You see the restructuredtext formatting, but it isn’t applied. See my own z3c.dependencychecker 2.4.2 for example.

I use an editor with restructuredtext syntax highlighting. I double-checked everything. I used docutils. I used pypi’s own readme_renderer to check it. Not a single error.

But still, after some tries, the formatting was still off. Then a fellow contributor adjusted one of the setup() keywords in our setup.py: something might have to be a string (as in another package, with a perfectly-rendering description) instead of a list (as we had). Sadly, no luck.

But it made me investigate the other keyword arguments. I noticed, next to long_description, the description. This is normally a one-line description. In our case, it was a multi-line string:

long_description = u'\n\n'.join([ ... some files .... ])

description = """
Checks which imports are done and compares them to what's
in setup.py and warns when discovering missing or unneeded
dependencies.
"""

setup(
    name='z3c.dependencychecker',
    version=version,
    description=description,
    long_description=long_description,

I changed it to a single line and yes, the next release worked fine on pypi!

(Note that I also toyed a bit with encodings in that pull request, but I don’t think that had any influence).

So: take a look at the description field if your project also has rendering problems (assuming that your long_description is fine).