Forgive me if I ask a stupid question but what characters are allowed
in a project name on PyPI and by Distribute/Setuptools?
I specifically ask because of what I think is a problem I found with
Distribute/Setuptools with the underscore character ("_")
It seems PyPI allows underscore as a valid character in a project name
and as such there are projects like pyramid_beaker, django_email_auth.
Distributes' behaviour is to replace all underscores to dashes using the
safe_name function
(https://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/src/611910892a04/pkg_resources.py#cl-1135).
Project name is registered with dashes in the egg (i.e pyramid-beaker)
and nowhere is the original name stored.
It seems, following lead Pip has adjusted its code accordingly
(https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/ea60bb79b5f837f0aa36d2354415dbcca5368afe/pip/index.py#L317)
As such, modifying the safe_name method to recognize undescore breaks
pip.
Doing "pip install pyramid_beaker" installs the package successfully
however any package tools (i.e pip) report the project as
"pyramid-beaker" and as such becomes unusable name if PyPI is queried
via RPC Interfaces. Trying to turn all the dashes back underscores
breaks packages that have underscores in them (i.e.
sphinxcontrib-programoutput). And if the package were to use both, it
would be impossible to determine what it is without running all the
permutations.
I would appreciate if any one could advise me on this matter and let me
know if this is a bug underscore treatment with Distribute/Setuptools,
pip or PyPI.
Here is the test code to reproduce the problem (in a virtualenv):
1. Setup a test virtualenv with "--distribute --no-site-packages" and
activate it
2. Install following packages:
pip install --ignore-installed --no-deps pyramid_beaker
pip install --ignore-installed --no-deps sphinxcontrib-programoutput
3. Save and run the following script that uses pip and XMLRPC to check
for new versions:
--------------------------------
import xmlrpclib
import pip
pypi = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://pypi.python.org/pypi')
for dist in pip.get_installed_distributions():
available = pypi.package_releases(dist.project_name)
if not available:
# Try to capitalize pkg name
available =
pypi.package_releases(dist.project_name.capitalize())
if not available:
msg = 'no releases at pypi'
elif available[0] != dist.version:
msg = '{} available'.format(available[0])
else:
msg = 'up to date'
pkg_info = '{dist.project_name} {dist.version}'.format(dist=dist)
print '{pkg_info:40} {msg}'.format(pkg_info=pkg_info, msg=msg)
---------------------------------
Output (specific to installed packages):
sphinxcontrib-programoutput 0.4.1 up to date
pyramid-beaker 0.5 no releases at pypi
[pyramid-beaker does not exist on PyPI, since its pyramid_beaker)
Expected output (mind the underscores)
sphinxcontrib-programoutput 0.4.1 up to date
pyramid_beaker 0.5 up to date
---- Additional info ---
pyramid_beaker-0.5-py2.7.egg-info/PKG-INFO shows that the project name
is:
Name: pyramid-beaker
_______________________________________________
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http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
