[Catalog-sig] start on static generation, and caching - apache config.

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:20 PM 7/11/2007 -0600, Jeremy Kloth wrote:
>On Wednesday 11 July 2007 4:40:26 pm Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> > 1. Access to "hidden" packages' release info
>
>This already exists. Simply call release_data() with the exact 
>version you are
>interested in. It returns the metadata regardless of the "hidden" flag.

There is no way to discover those versions, however, AFAICT


> > 2. Links in the long_description that are rendered by PyPI's web interface
>
>The 'description' key in the dictionary returned by release_data() contains
>the long_description as provided by the package's setup.py. I would think
>that scanning just that should be simpler than relying on particular
>formatting of the PyPI generated package page.

Alas, this entire subject area is one where lots of people "would 
think" that such-and-such a thing would be simpler, but 
isn't.  :(  In this case, long_description is allowed to be 
reStructured Text, which nothing less than a full reST parser can 
handle.  It's much easier to scan for a simple regular expression 
pattern to pull the links out of HTML, than to handle all the ways 
URLs can be spelled in reST, AFAICT.

That having been said, I've never actually made the attempt, for 
simple historical reasons.  I'll happily review patches for the 
functionality, as long as they can gracefully fall back to 
non-XML-RPC use, or provide an option to disable it so people using 
their own static indexes can still function.