[Catalog-sig] Deprecate External Links

[PJ Eby]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Donald Stufft <donald.stufft at gmail.com> wrote:
> Development snapshots are a use case that i'm not sure makes sense
> for PyPI, but if they do should require specific opt-in to install them.
> Does easy_install have a command line flag that adds extra links?

*chuckle*.  Yes, it's the original source of the --find-links option,
emulated in pip to ease migration.

> can your instructions simply state to do the equivalent of
> `pip install --find-links=http://setuptools.com/dev-snapshopts/`?

The problem with find-links is that if you push them off of PyPI, they
have to go somewhere else, which is setuptools' "dependency-links"
feature.  Now you have an even *harder* problem to update or remove
those links, because they're not under the control of the author nor
visible on PyPI.


> Alternatively I would like to get the tooling smarter about not installing
> pre-release versions unless asked as well.

Yes, and that discussion doesn't have much to do with PyPI per se,
because again, it's up to the tools.