[Catalog-sig] [Announce] Distutils Catalog Prototype

[Amos Latteier]

Hi Guys,

I finally got off my butt and built a distutils catalog prototype. Now
for a limited time you can get to it at

  http://63.230.174.230:8080/

This is a Zope site that allows you to upload distutils archives and
search them. I added a basic HTML and XML interface. The XML interface
should be used by command-line clients. The user name and password for
uploading are both 'guest'. I am going to remove this account in a
couple days since it is fundamentally insecure. I mostly want to post
this now so folks can see what I'm doing. If you want to play with the
prototype more, get Zope 2.3 and install the
DistutilsArchive20010226.tgz file.

I've preloaded the site with one archive (distutils 1.0.1). Try out the
site by uploading your own archives. If the site can't parse them take a
look in Parse.py and figure out what the problem is and send me a patch.

Issues

  * Executing setup.py to find meta-data is insecure. Plus I've found
that many existing distutils archives don't actually expose the
meta-data very well this way. I propose that we fix this by having
distutils write a meta-data file when you build an archive.

  * What API would command-line tools like? XML in some home-cooked DTD?
Maybe XML-RPC?

Let me know what you think!

-Amos

--
Amos Latteier         mailto:amos@digicool.com
Digital Creations     http://www.digicool.com