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

[P.J. Eby]

At 01:07 AM 6/19/2010 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>Am 18.06.2010 18:47, schrieb Mark Ramm:
>>On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 5:41 PM, "Martin v. 
>>Löwis"<martin at v.loewis.de>  wrote:
>>>>It does?  I thought PyPI kept everything around (but hidden) unless the
>>>>author went in and manually deleted old stuff.  You just need to go to a
>>>>deep link, e.g., http://pypi.python.org/pypi/SomePackage/0.1
>>>
>>>Sure, but owners *do* manually delete old stuff.
>>
>>Am I wrong in remembering that old packages get dropped from the
>>simple index?
>
>You are indeed misremembering. They used to, but don't, any longer, 
>on user request.

How many users?  I'm thinking it might be better to meet this use 
case the way pip does -- i.e., look up the specific version when a 
specific hidden version is requested, but otherwise only show active 
versions.  The current behavior makes it harder for package authors 
to control what versions are automatically installable by default.