[Catalog-sig] How to get a list of package releases

[Rob]

> >On 1/28/07, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > What is still NOT clear -- because you still haven't explained it -- is why
> > > this information needs to be available to automated tools, as opposed to
> > > simply being available to humans through the web interface.  None of the
> > > use cases you've presented seem to call for an automated tool.
> >
> >

As a Python package maintainer for a Linux distro I would find this info
very useful (I found this thread today when I was about to ask for
this feature).

For instance, yesterday we had a bug report about a package with an
incorrect license (pexpect changed from PSF to MIT).  We have several
versions available and it would have been handy to be able to check the
license for each version to make sure they were all correct instead of
downloading each tarball and reading the metadata manually.

I wrote yolk, which queries PyPI via the XML-RPC interface, to help with this
type of thing and it would be nice to have an option via XML-RPC to
query all the hidden packages also.

Another problem I've come across is that sometimes you'll find a link to
a PyPI web page for a package that has been hidden, through google
or another project that has it listed as a dependency etc. It would be nice
if you were looking at a web page for a hidden package that it said in
big bold writing that this package is hidden and have a link to the
newer version(s).


Rob