[Catalog-sig] Proposal to Reverse Ordering of Scraped Links in PyPI

[Michael Foord]

On 25 July 2010 23:41, Armin Ronacher <armin.ronacher at active-4.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I guess we can all agree on the fact that setuptools/distribute's way to
> find
> packages and package versions is an interesting but unreliable hack.
>  However
> the problem here is that right now many people depend on setuptools and
> there is
> a problem in the combination of setuptools and PyPI and the best way to fix
> this
> is PyPI.
>
>

Heh pip, distribute and setuptools *really* shouldn't be scraping pypi - at
least except as a last resort. pypi has an xml-rpc (and a fledgling json
api) which should be used in preference to scraping. This *already* causes
problems for pypi maintenance.

Michael Foord



> First the problem: setuptools knows the concept of encoding special
> versions of
> packages into URLs in package descriptions.  Many people use that to refer
> to
> development versions.  However if you do that, and the URL changes in a
> later
> version, on the simple index all links will still be present.
>
> In combination with setuptools/distribute's behaviour of using the last
> match,
> this means that you are unable to change the link unless you delete the old
> description as well.
>
> As a fix I would recommend just listing the latest links on the simple page
> or
> to reverse the order so that easy_install picks up the right one.
>
> Here is an example of such a problematic PyPI item:
>
>  http://pypi.python.org/simple/Flask-Babel/
>
> Obviously, the link to mitsuhiko/flask-sqlalchemy is correct and
> USERNAME/REPOSITORY is wrong :)
>
> Is that something that could be changed in PyPI or would that go into a new
> version of setuptools/distribute?  Right now it seems like the only
> solution is
> to either delete or edit old entries to fix the links.
>
>
> Regards,
> Armin
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalog-SIG mailing list
> Catalog-SIG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
>



-- 
http://www.voidspace.org.uk
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/catalog-sig/attachments/20100725/e380e0c1/attachment.html>