On 1/22/07, Phillip J. Eby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 02:12 AM 1/20/2007 +0100, =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Micha=B3_Kwiatkowski?= wrote: > >The problem as I see it is that > >although easy_install can find all possible versions they are not > >listed on PyPI. > > I'm confused. easy_install can only find versions that are listed on > PyPI. If there is a download link or homepage link on PyPI that points > to a page with lots of downloadable versions, easy_install can discover > them from there, but that's not something you're going to get through any > PyPI API.
Setuptools is too smart. ;) The question I'm trying to get an answer for is: "what versions of foobar can I install?". Going to http://python.org/pypi/foobar doesn't yield me any useful results - it just shows the latest release. It's not so uncommon for projects to have more than one official release - even as simple as development and stable branches. They can be installed via easy_install and setuptools is great at finding out the download locations, but there's no easy way to see what options are available from a PyPI project page. For starters, there is no "list all releases" page, and that's what my mail is mainly about. But I also have another doubt, related to this discussion. Should PyPI be treated more as a proxy or a repository? If it's a proxy, it's perfectly OK to just point people to relevant sites, when they can learn their installation options on their own. On the other hand, PyPI is a part of setuptools chain, which is a base of Python package distribution, and that means it simply cannot be treated as a plain proxy. Ambiguity may come from the fact that, opposed to its name, PyPI isn't a simple index of packages. It is also an infrastructure that makes distribution of Python packages easy. PyPI isn't only about indexing packages, but also about making them publicly available for vast community of Python developers. I understand that to encourage developers to list their packages on PyPI some compromises had to be made. Smart functionality built in into setuptools make a transition as simple as putting a link to project homepage into PyPI package info. Question is how long this transitional state should be kept? Currently we have a lot more logic in the client (easy_install) than in the server (PyPI). So now we have this strange situation when an installation client knows more about a package than the packages server. Shouldn't we constantly move toward removing magic from setuptools and porting important bits to PyPI? Cheers, mk _______________________________________________ Catalog-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
