[Catalog-sig] egg_info in PyPI

[Thomas Lotze]

Sridhar Ratnakumar wrote:

> Just curious: aside from the static metadata issue which you recognize,
> how would you make tl.eggdeps analyze dependencies between any packages
> registered on PyPI  when not all of them upload their sdists (hence no
> egg_info) to PyPI?

For packages that aren't even eggs, I can do nothing. For those which are
but just don't have any distribution files uploaded, we've considered
running a service (although most likely not on the PyPI server itself)
that tries to hunt down sdists or eggs the same way setuptools does.
Again, there's a number of packages with metadata available that I
consider good enough for use cases such as mine.

> Also, if I may ask, what is the intended use for tl.eggdeps?

One example is its use by the Zope project in analysing and cleaning up
dependencies between the packages in the zope namespace after Zope's
eggification.

> For use in
> package managers (buildout, pip)? If yes, then ... would providing
> egg_info in PyPI obviate the need for package managers such as pip to
> download sources before resolving dependencies

I'm not sure that it would be useful to share the dependency resolution
code between package managers and clients such as tl.eggdeps, and it is
certainly not my current intent. Maybe it turns out one day that a general
client library for consumers of dependency metadata is worthwhile, but I
imagine that different applications do widely varying things with the
dependency graph so who knows.

> (keeping in mind that even
> packages that do upload their sdists to PyPI sometimes end up not doing
> the same - perhaps out of forgetfulness - for theirs latest releases)?

Well, if a package doesn't make distributions or metadata for its latest
releases available, then all consumers of that information are out of luck
in the same way, aren't they?

-- 
Thomas