[WIP] Algorithm to obtain metadata from an addon name

[sbidoul]

I will describe here a possible algorithm to obtain the metadata from a single addon name.

The main idea is to obtain the metadata from https://pypi.org/simple. The advantage of this approach is that it can be done in javascript in the browser, so the documentation page for an addon can be static, with a dynamic widget showing the metadata.

How to list the Odoo series for which the addon is available

In short:

• if https://pypi.org/simple/odoo-addon-{addon-name}/ exists, look at the available wheel versions (will give series >= 15)
• for older series, look for https://pypi.org/simple/odoo-addon{series}-{addon-name}/

Example : curl -sSL -H "Accept: application/vnd.pypi.simple.v1+json" https://pypi.org/simple/odoo-addon-mis-builder | jq

Details TBC.

How to get a METADATA file for an addon and Odoo series

In short: find the URL of the last available wheel and add a .metadata suffix. This will give a METADATA file as described below.

Details TBC.

Metadata details

Here we show the mapping from METADATA entries to __manifest__.py entries. Example.

• Home-Page: website (GitHub repo URL)
• Authors: author
• Summary: summary
• Requires-Dist: depends + external_dependencies["python"]
• Version: version (plus one last digit, or plus .devN for older series)
• License: license

__manifest__ metadata that is not available:

• maintainers

The README is available in the METADATA files, so this may be exploitable in the browser? It is in .rst format, though.

TBC

[yajo]

This is a very nice approach!

Going a bit off-topic, I'm thinking that, instead of adding a download button like our current shop has (which I guess nobody uses), we can just have a section saying something like:

How to install:

pip install odoo-addon-mis-builder

That would fit well with a SSG like this, and still handle all dependencies automatically with close to zero maintenance on our side.

[sbidoul]

One worry I have with the frontend/js approach is SEO.

I wonder if we could use the GitHub API on merge in the addons repos, to trigger a workflow here that would do a partial rebuild and therefore have the metadata in the static pages.

[yajo]

Why do you think SEO would be affected?

[sbidoul]

Why do you think SEO would be affected?

The frontend folks I frequent tend to tell me dynamic content negatively affects SEO. That was certainly true in the past. I never bothered to look for a definitive modern explanation for this, though.

[TumbaoJu]

This project has been abandoned due to community objections on the fact of having part of the doc elsewhere and not with the code and of having only one version of the doc per version.

We will work on developing a tool that will help edit or write the Read me for non-technical people instead.