[Catalog-sig] [Python-Dev] egg_info in PyPI

[P.J. Eby]

At 06:06 PM 9/18/2010 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>Am 18.09.10 17:49, schrieb P.J. Eby:
>>At 05:19 PM 9/18/2010 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>>>In the specific case of tl.eggdeps, the dependency information is only
>>>used to create printable graphs. If this turns out to be slightly
>>>incorrect, people would notice if they try to use the packages in
>>>question.
>>
>>By the way, just providing this information for .egg files and *not* for
>>sdists would ensure accuracy of the metadata for that platform/python
>>version.
>
>True (I presume - unless there are also dependencies on the specific
>OS version or system installation that may affect the metadata).

No, because an egg's egg-info is what it is.  easy_install doesn't 
rebuild that information, so it is correct by 
definition.  ;-)  (Certainly, it is what it will be used for 
dependency information.)


>OTOH, I do think that the users asking for that prefer per-release
>information, despite the limitations that this may have.
>
>OTTH, if the concerns could be relieved if egg-info would provided
>for all files that have it, I could provide that as well/instead.

I am +0 on the idea myself, as I don't think the plan is quite enough 
to be able to provide a user-experience upgrade for use cases besides 
"make me a dependency graph without downloading the distributions themselves".

It certainly would be nice to be able to say to the user, "here are 
the things I will need to download in order to fulfill your request," 
but if you have to download individual files to get at that 
information, I'm not sure how much it helps vs. just downloading the files.