[Catalog-sig] Super heavy index page

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/25/2012 8:48 AM, martin at v.loewis.de wrote:
>> I would like to suggest redirecting http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ to
>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi

For people, the latter has a [List packages] button that maps to
http://pypi.python.org/pypi?action=index

> This would break tools who use that URL to fetch the complete list of
> packages. Old setuptools versions did; not sure whether they are still
> in use, or whether any other tools fetch the package list from there.

Too bad the tools were not taught to use the synonym above (assuming it 
would work for them). Would it be possible for the server to immediately 
return the boilerplate sidebar and header before returning the sorted 
list a few seconds later. For people, it would be more reassuring to see 
a partial response immediately.

It seems to me that tools would be better off with just the list itself 
without the surrounding stuff that they have to ignore (filter out). 
Also, tools could be sent an unsorted list that they could sort locally 
if they needed it. I suspect most do not, or only need sorting after 
filtering.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy