You will be astonished to learn exactly how dumb the index is. Most of the metadata used for package discovery is in the file names. Then whole packages are downloaded and executed to produce their metadata. Improving this is a major goal. On May 16, 2013 7:35 PM, "James Carpenter" wrote:

I haven't read PEP 426, but one of the things I would keep in mind is to consider moving to or additionally supporting a Maven style repository layout. It isn't that a Maven layout is necessary better than layout X. It is just that the Maven artifact repository managers are far more mature than anything we saw in PyPI land and probably will be for years to come. https://github.com/teamfruit/defend_against_fruit/wiki/Survey-of-Existing-Py...

This is probably largely orthogonal to how your dependency meta-data is maintained. The only real constraint would be to ensure the meta-data file is published alongside the artifact (similar to ivy.xml or pom.xml files). Otherwise, the only efficient way to navigate the meta-data is to bake the functionality into the repository and expose a web service. That isn't necessary wrong in theory, but in practice it would mean you couldn't just use a mature Maven derived repository manager like Nexus, Artifactory, or Archiva. In both Maven and Ivy the repository can be rather stupid since the dependency resolution mechanisms are baked into the build tool instead of the repository.

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

...

Very interesting!

The next draft of the metadata 2.0 spec is probably a couple of weeks away from broader public consumption, at which time I'll be interested in hearing whether or not that better meets DAF's needs (especially for transitive dependency tracking).

(I haven't been putting the interim PEP 426 updates on python.org as they're currently a somewhat incoherent mixture of the first draft of the new JSON based interchange format and the rationale for the last version that still used the old key:value format)

Cheers, Nick.

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