At 07:09 PM 7/6/2006 +1000, richardjones@optusnet.com.au wrote:

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

...

Patches welcome. :) Note that there should still be a fallback to the screen scraping code in case of a problem with the XML-RPC, to allow people to continue using static mirrors of PyPI or imitation PyPIs without needing to support XML-RPC.

Why?

Why not? ;) From easy_install's point of view, PyPI is just a place to find links for a given package name. Preferably links that go directly to downloads, but also to pages that might contain downloads. If someone doesn't want to use PyPI as the source of download links, shouldn't they be able to use their own, without having to implement an XML-RPC interface? Actually, the question of "how do I get easy_install to use something other than PyPI?" has been becoming somewhat of a FAQ recently. Well, two people have asked about it in the last couple of weeks, anyway. And it would've sucked to have to say "well, first you need an XML-RPC server..." :) Nonetheless, there are various aspects of easy_install's behavior and performance that could be significantly improved by using XML-RPC, so I definitely want it to do that in 0.7. I'm just wary of removing the existing behavior until it's clear that it's unnecessary for it to.