Didn't Setuptools/easy_install began this policy of following the
download_url from PyPI's early days when it wasn't even possible to
upload to PyPI (or at least during the transition when a majority of
packages only provided download_urls).
Not sure whether this was rhetoric: yes, that's how it all started.
PyPI/the cheeseshop was originally *just* a package index, and designed
as such. Automated downloads wheren't even considered, but the objective
was to give people a way of registering and finding Python software
(because the manually-maintained lists of Python software started to rot).
I added file upload at some point, primarily because people asked for it
who didn't have any web hosting elsewhere. It was assumed that most
packages would release somewhere to the net, and only few packages would
use the file upload.
FWIW, the documentation upload started with the very same assumption,
and it's probably still the case that people host documentation at PyPI
only if they have nothing better.
Regards,
Martin
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