For newer packages using pyproject.toml and other more-modern systems for embedding metadata, sometimes details like the "author" wind up empty or weirdly formatted.

Sopel 8.0.0, for example, is on track to have an "Author" name field that effectively contains ', '.join(author_list). In other cases, such as when both a name and email are specified for a single author, the "Author" name field is empty and both the name & email end up in the "Author-Email" field. (The latter case has this plugin show "(unknown name)", because the name-only field is empty.)

pypi/warehouse#9400 and pypi/warehouse#14813 describe the odd behaviors we (the loose collective of Sopel core & plugin maintainers) have noticed, and it doesn't seem like there is yet any real motivation to mitigate them on the PyPI side. In lieu, we might need to make sopel-pypi itself "smarter" about extracting useful metadata and/or displaying it in a useful way on IRC.

Comma-separated lists of authors could benefit from at least converting the final , into &, or perhaps from capping the author list with et al. if there are a lot of entries (to leave more room for the package description).

Empty "Author" fields could pull from the "Author-Email" and extract only the names… which could be complicated if some entries consist only of email addresses, but those entries could use a fallback value like the email username.

I can't get to all of the plugins at once, and we think this is a lesser-used one. But I intend to get to them all Eventually™ and creating an issue that I can self-assign helps with that.

This plugin also doesn't cap the version of sopel it requires to <8, so it won't refuse to work on the new Sopel 8 release or cause pip to silently downgrade an existing bot—which pushes it down the priority list, below other plugins that do do that.

(The project doesn't collect any analytics, so we have only anecdotal evidence and guesses to figure out which plugins are frequently used. Guessing is probably good enough. Probably.)