[Catalog-sig] [Distutils] Prototype setuptools-specific PyPI index.

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I am familiar with an open source project called Radmind.  It
> maintains machines be keeping a local transcript with all of the files
> and "overloads" on it.  When you modify the file system you diff the
> changes into an overload and put them on the server.

That's still a lot of terminology which I don't understand, and have
no intuition for, perhaps because English is not my native language.
I give up trying to understand - just to give you an idea:
What's a "transcript of files"? How do you "overload" on it (why
is "to overload" used with the preposition "on")? How do I "diff" a
change "into" "an overload" (which now is a noun, it seems)?

> So, if someone does an "incorrect" search, easy_install checks to see
> first if it has the latest "file".  If not, it then replaces its local
> index.  Then the search happens locally, not being going back and
> forth to the server.

I think this brings us to the real issue: you asked whether this would
be a bad idea to suggest that? I now think "perhaps not bad, but
unhelpful, unless you also contribute an implementation of it".
It's a change to setuptools, which is still mostly a one-man-show,
(IIUC), so proposing ideas in general is futile (as for most software
with a single author - including PyPI); the single author cannot
possibly implement all the ideas people have.

Regards,
Martin