Read information from language-specific package description files

[hubgit]

See the wiki for a summary of the main package description formats.

If a package description file already exists in the repository, read information from there.

Examples: package.json (node), bower.json (web), composer.json (PHP), META.json (Perl), DESCRIPTION (R), etc…

[robldavidson]

Sounds like a good idea. Would also be good to create a universal format for anyone working in a non-standard language.
That could simply be the common subset of essential fields from all those formats listed in your link.
At best, it would encourage uniformity across languages and allow new developers to learn about one package description format that would apply to any language they ended up using.

[hubgit]

https://xkcd.com/927/

[robldavidson]

Ha. Point well made.

[hubgit]

There's a related thread in the json-ld.js issue tracker about adding JSON-LD context file to a package.json file.