On 7 October 2014 11:09, holger krekel <holger@merlinux.eu> wrote:
Well, the main benefit of PEP438 was that it removed random crawling for some 90% of the packages on the package index, speeding up and making installs more reliable. And it did that without breaking backward compatibility.
The setuptools index page is 1.4MB in size. Most of that can be ignored, but it still has to be downloaded and parsed. Whether the data that setuptools includes in its long_description is useful is arguable, but irrelevant - the fact is that as things stand, it is there and it causes issues. PEP 470 would result in all of the unneeded entries in the simple index for setuptools being removed, which avoids the need for client tools (and I'm not talking just about pip here, but also about one-off scripts, which is the sort of thing I write a lot) to trawl through all of that data. And it does so without the setuptools project having to change how it writes its PyPI page (i.e., the project long_description). Arguably, that's equally a way of avoiding breaking backward compatibility...
The second could be done without breakage alltogether i think: at one time all external urls are auto-registered as external indexes and they are presented on the simple page with some meta information that does not confuse older pips/easy_installs. Newer pips/easy_installs can then provide nice error messages. Older pips can continue to use the PEP438 options. And easy install can continue to work.
Setuptools has 255 internal links to files hosted on PyPI. And about 11,000 other links. (I just checked that 3 times, as I couldn't believe it, but it *seems* to be right :-(). Removing duplicates, 337 unique links. Are you suggesting pip presents all of those as possible external indexes? I'm sure you can argue that setuptools has (badly!) misused the link-handling support in PyPI. And that it's a one-off special case. But how do we document to projects that they shouldn't do things like this? How do we even define what "things like this" are? Don't include links in your project description unless they are external indexes? Paul.