[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.