At 07:35 PM 4/20/2006 +1000, Richard Jones wrote: >Please fire away. I may have some time to work on this in the near future. >Current stuff I know about: > >- PEP for metadata 1.2 > http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0345.html > (though this is not finished nor has it been commented on)
I think that PEP needs to go back to the drawing board; it emphasizes too much the syntax of fields, while leaving their semantics entirely void. For example, it dictates what format projects may specify version numbers in, using a scheme that's too strict for even Python itself to comply with. But then it leaves the meaning of requirements to be community-defined. There's little point in having machine-readable data with no machine-comprehensible semantics. That is, why make people force fit stuff into a form that machines will never use anyway? >- auto-generate download_urls for package uploads This seems unnecessary to me, since easy_install reads the upload links just fine where they are, but of course I'm biased. :) >- command-line tool to query pypi and fetch entries (is this necessary > given easy_install?) A stable, documented interface to perform the operations that easy_install does now via screen-scraping and URL interpretation would be useful. The other things I'd add to the list are (decreasing priority): 1) the ability to treat project names and versions as case-insensitive, while removing extraneous characters (as in pkg_resources.safe_name()) for purposes both of searching and determining name uniqueness when registering. 2) Compute "cheesecake" scores for modified entries (using only the metrics that don't actually run any of the package's code, of course) and display them prominently. :) 3) Provide better explanation as to what to put in the fields: encourage people distributing via Sourceforge to put their showfiles.php URL in as the download URL, or any other page that has actual clickable links to download files. 4) More strongly encourage people to use "setup.py register", by having the web interface generate a setup.py containing the information they filled in, and suggesting that they use it, while making it hard to find the button that will go ahead and put the data in from the web. This can be billed as a new convenience feature to automatically generate a setup.py and help people improve their cheesecake scores. ;-) _______________________________________________ Catalog-sig mailing list Catalog-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
