Richer author information

[simonbyrne]

I would like to propose that we allow for richer authors information in the Project.toml. Instead of a string of "name <email>", I propose that each author be a TOML table. I would propose the following keys be supported initially:

• name
• email
• github for github username
• orcid

Of these, only name would be required.

Some others we may want to consider:

• greater name granularity (e.g. givenname/familyname?), to make it easier to parse different reference styles.
• affiliation, similar to a paper?

Benefits:

• name-email pairs are not great as identifiers: emails can become stale (people move institutions), some people dislike having their emails public
• it would make it easier to parse and process for other uses, e.g. zenodo submissions or including a list of authors + github links in the documentation.

This would mean that authors could be represented in TOML as an array of tables (though personally I find that syntax a bit clunky).

[simonbyrne]

As far as I can tell from the Pkg code, authors isn't actually read at any point, so I don't think this would be incompatible with older Julia versions.

[KristofferC]

Yeah, I think this is just about establishing some convention.