[Catalog-sig] New proposal, with PEP

[Richard Jones]

On Sat, 26 Oct 2002 6:37 pm, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> Richard Jones <rjones@ekit-inc.com> writes:
> > I've now posted three messages on the subject of my online catalog effort
> > - four if you count the message I sent to the distutils sig. None of
> > those posts have generated any feedback to me. Not even "piss off, you're
> > wasting our precious time". That's a bit damn disheartening.
>
> I think this is the problem. If you get disheartened easily, expect to
> give up sooner or later, like everybody else before you.

Note that I continued on to say that I have not given up. Just that some 
feedback (either positive, negative _or_ ambivalent) would be nice.


> Every time somebody comes along and offers some kind of catalog, I ask
> whether they actually want to operate it, or whether they only want to
> write the software - or perhaps even just define a spec.
>
> I'm not interested in specs, and I'm only mildly interested in
> software. What I want to see is the catalog in operation.

It's in operation right now (minus the user-based features which are pretty 
trivial to implement) at the hosting I use. I've had several users querying 
the catalog and submitting information to it.

It's not in operation at python.org though, which I see as being important to 
its acceptance. I don't have any control over that. Hence the PEP. Ongoing 
support would be minimal, and I'd be gladly putting my hand up to take on 
that job, assuming I can have access to the machine python.org is hosted on.


> > People have looked at and used the prototype though, so I suppose at
> > least the posts weren't ignored. I'm persisting regardless, because
> > I believe I've got a good idea, and I have friends who also believe
> > I'm on to a good thing too. I also know there's a history of little
> > support for these projects.
>
> I think you are misinterpreting history. People used to get quite
> involved in discussing specs; these days, they might be tired because
> of fear that the project won't progress beyond the spec phase.
>
> As for contributions to the software: Most software was good enough
> when released initially.
>
> As for actually using the infrastructure: That was typically
> impossible because of the lack of infrastructure to use.
>
> What other support would you expect?

For this to work, I need:

1. the web interface installed on python.org, and either someone there to
   look after it or access so I can look after it,
2. the "register" command included in the next non-patch python distribution
   (ie. 2.3), and
3. optionally have the distutils metadata expanded to include Trove
   discriminators

I deliberately minimised the infrastructure requirement of the implementation 
so that it could run with little impact on python.org. I could just leave it 
running on my host, but that'd have nowhere near the legitemacy of it running 
on python.org.


      Richard