PyPI Enhancements

[David McNab]

Hi,

I'm just looking through the PyPI tutorial, liking the fact that it's 
now integrated with distutils, but seeing room for much more.

Is any work being done to add some CPAN-like or apt-like features to PyPI?

On first look, it doesn't appear that it would be too hard to add some 
debian apt-like features such as:

* ability to declare dependencies in the setup.py metadata
* a pypi directory inside the python directory tree, containing:
    * package source trees
    * cached list and dependency tree
    * list of what's installed and what isn't
    * an apt-like 'sources.list', whereby people can at their
      discretion add supplementary download sources or mirrors
* a pypi command, which:
    * searches/lists/downloads desired package(s)
    * caches a dependency tree
    * when trying to build or install a new package, builds a tree
      of unfulfilled dependencies, and asks for permission to
      download/build(/install) the dependencies

I'd see it ideally working a bit like Debian's 'apt-get' and
'apt-cache' commands.

For instance:

  - pypi search <keyword> [<keyword>...]
  - pypi download <pkgname> [<pkgname>...]
  - pypi build <pkgname> [<pkgname>...]
  - pypi install <pkgname> [<pkgname>...]

The 'download', 'build' and 'install' commands would require root, and 
would cause packages to get downloaded into a pypi directory within the 
python lib. If these packages have unfulfilled dependencies, pypi (like 
Debian's 'apt') would list the additional packages and ask for 
permission to build/install these as well.

Also:
  - pypi enable-auto

This would install dummy modules for all non-installed packages. When a 
program tries to import an uninstalled package, pypi terminates the 
program with a PypiNotInstalled exception, telling the user to become 
root and install the missing packages (of course, listing the packages 
needing to be installed.

Thoughts?

Cheers
David