[Catalog-sig] [Distutils] Specification for package indexes?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 07:09 PM 7/6/2006 +1000, richardjones at optusnet.com.au wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> 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.