On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 11:27 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

On 19 Sep 2014 04:54, "Georg Brandl" <g.brandl@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> On 09/18/2014 08:26 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
>
> > Every time an issue like this comes up, I know that I'm looking to do
> > "pip install XXX". It's working out what XXX is that's the problem.
> >
> > So I go and ask Google. A quick check on the progress bar case gets me
> > to a StackOverflow article that offers me a lot of "write it yourself"
> > solutions, and pointers to a couple of libraries. Further down there
> > are a few pointers to python-progressbar, which was mentioned in the
> > StackOverflow article, which in turn leads me to the PyPI page for it.
> > The latest version (2.3-dev) is not hosted on PyPI, so I hit all the
> > fun of --allow-external.

Paul, this could make a good "What problem are we actually trying to fix?" summary on pypa.io.

We have spent a lot of time so far on the "getting people the packages they ask for" side of things, but have barely scratched the surface of "helping people find the packages that can help them". At the moment "word of mouth" is one of our main discovery tools, and that's an issue for newcomers that may not have a big network of fellow developers yet.

This is a problem I think the Django community actually addressed fairly well through https://www.djangopackages.com/

There are similar comparison sites for Pyramid & Plone, after Audrey & Danny broke out the back end of Django Packages to make it independently deployable (see http://opencomparison.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)