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

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Brian Jones <bkjones at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:51 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> And "searching for dependencies" seems like the same need Brian has.
>
> I just want to clarify that need: I want to be able to search PyPI for all
> packages dependent on some package 'x'. I would think that easy_install/pip
> probably need the reverse: to find all dependencies of some package 'x'.

Yes.

> It boils down to finding packages with similar attributes, and hopefully it
> shouldn't matter what that attribute is ('dependent on x', 'target python
> version y', etc). This alone doesn't seem like it should be particularly
> difficult, though I could see an implementation of a search for stacked
> attributes ('depends on x *and* target python version y *and*...) really
> becoming a performance/infrastructure-related issue (but I don't know
> anything about the current infrastructure).

Yeah, you'd need to index the result

I don't remember which, but some packaging systems repositories do
this to speed up installers work. (Debian maybe). Maybe a good way to
prototype this would be to create a standalone index that gets built
by visiting PyPI to provide a search engine.

Alexis has started such a prototype using CouchDB, because he wanted
to experiment a REST-like interface to replace our current XML-RPC
APIs, CC'ing him.

In any case we should focus on having these tools built on the
standard metadata sets: Metadata 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. Then suggest that
people add Metadata 1.2 support in their projects --target for first
d2 beta: pycon--  The latter contains static dependencies definitions.
see PEP 345.

Working on common metadata standards for publishing depgraphs is the
only sane way to do it.

Cheers,
Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org