[Catalog-sig] API search by python version (or classifier)

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 1:06 AM, Brian Jones <bkjones at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm wondering how hard it would be to provide a search by either Python
> version, or better, classifier?

You clearly mean something other than the "browse" interface already
present in the web interface. What sort of search would you mean?


> In truth, I'm wondering about all sorts of features that might bring PyPI
> into the current century, for example, a REST interface, more robust (and
> faster) searching capabilities (like searching by dependency), a more
> intuitive notion of 'ranking', tagging, an API for easy_install-like tools
> that don't require scraping, etc.

These all sound like great ideas. I would love for developers of tools
like easy_install to help design more efficient, non-scraping
interfaces for PyPI. I've stated this publicly for years now :-)

Note that the recent mirroring efforts probably limit some of the
really fancy things you can do in a distributed sense.


> Is any of this on the radar? Is there a
> published document along the lines of '2011 Goals'? Is the TODO list the
> only current notion of a roadmap for PyPI?

I have no current goals for the system. I'm not aware of any that
Martin (the other developer) might have, not am I aware of anyone
actively working on any patches.

As has been stated a bazillion times, code contributions are almost
always welcome :-)


> I've written an application myself to provide PyPI-like features internally
> due to frustration in dealing with PyPI itself from a dev perspective.

Frustration which at least I was completely unaware of :-)


> I gather that supporting external developers was probably not an initial
> design goal of PyPI.

I'm not sure what you mean by "supporting external developers".

The initial design goals of PyPI were captured in PEP 301
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0301/ ... and it's grown
organically since then.


     Richard