[Catalog-sig] [Proposal] Registered packages must provide the source code distribution on PyPI

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I see a point in that, but what is more important, having a catalog to
> browse or having a reliable repository of software to download?

It's the Python Package Index, so clearly, the catalog function is more 
important than the reliable repository function. People use PyPI to find 
out whether a Python module for a certain problem exists.

Only some of the users use it to automatically download from it in a 
regular manner.

> How about only listing packages with provided source code on the simple
> interface?

If you, as a user, have a policy to not use packages which you can't 
download from PyPI, can't you just ignore those packages when browsing?

> afaik buildout always uses that, so a package python-openid is visible
> in the
> end-user view, but not installable via buildout. That way nobody would
> ever have had
> created a dependency on it in the first place.

Apparently, whoever created the dependency to python-openid didn't worry 
about this specific issue.

FWIW, I evaluated python-openid, and found that it's better to rewrite 
it than to reuse it (regardless of where it's hosted).

Regards,
Martin