From: Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com>
Vinay Sajip was maintaining metadata as described here, I'm sure there are functions in distil to help fetch it.
Yes, though there is no need for any special API to access it - the metadata is in JSON files served statically. You just make a standard HTTP request, using the client library of your choice, to get a specific URL. The files are under http://www.red-dove.com/pypi/projects/ And you can just use a browser to browse the metadata from this starting point.
The most severe problem with this data is of course that it is not always correct because the environment he evaluated setup.py in to get the data may be different than yours.
Indeed, which is why declarative metadata is so important. Down with setup.py! Regards, Vinay Sajip