[Catalog-sig] Re: New proposal, with PEP

[Richard Jones]

On Fri, 8 Nov 2002 5:40 am, Thomas Heller wrote:
> Richard Jones <rjones@ekit-inc.com> writes:
> > On Sun, 27 Oct 2002 5:37 am, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> > >  But if
> > > that is the way to go, how is this different from the Vaults, or
> > > Freshmeat? If I were to look for Python packages, I'd look at
> >
> > Because:
> >
> > 1. there's no integration with distutils, and consequently no one-shot,
> > trivial mechanism for submitting metadata,
> > 2. neither of the above are hosted at python.org, and hence don't have
> > any of the legitemacy that that hosting would bring, and
> > 3. Freshmeat is a pain to use, and only supports open-source Linux
> > projects (or at a minimum open-source projects that are available on
> > Linux).
>
> Not a very satisfactory answer, IMO.
>
> Some time ago, the vaults have been the best place to find new python
> software.

For existing users of python, maybe. Even I tend to not use the vaults as much 
as I should. New users certainly have no idea what the "Vaults of Parnassus" 
might be, or that they actually are the most complete index of python stuff.

I believe my first two points are still quite valid. I would love to work with 
the Vaults people, but I've attempted to contact them to no avail.


> Search engines have improved, bandwidths have improved, so nowadays I
> can certainly find interesting things with google *only*.  Many things
> can simply be find by entering http://packageIwant.sf.net/ ;-).

You know the name of every package you want? Impressive.

Every package you want is hosted on sourceforge? Unbelievable.


> The only things I'm missing so far (but maybe I simply haven't found
> them) is a way to automatically find the URL of the newest version of
> a certain software package for a certain Python version, say Numeric,
> win32all, wxPython or whatever.
>
> So I believe the most important thing for a catalog is:
>
> - to provide actual up-to-date download URLs to the actual packages,
> indexed maybe by version and type(source, binary, platform)
>
> - an api to request and process this information from within Python.

The index I've developed is easily extensible to include a download URL (or 
set of URLs). You're already working on the download handling with pypan.

I am attempting to achieve modest goals, in an effort to get _something_ done.


    Richard