[Catalog-sig] remove historic download/homepage links for a project (was: Re: Deprecate External Links)

[PJ Eby]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 4:28 AM, holger krekel <holger at merlinux.eu> wrote:
> I wrote a little command line tool "cleanpypi.py" for the
> purposes of removing _all_ download/homepage metadata from all releases
> of a project.  See it attached - WARNING: it's a hack but worked for me.
> It uses the xmlrpc interface to get release data and then the SUBMIT POST
> hook to register the new "cleaned up" metadata.  If you want to
> play with it, you might comment the final "req.post" request so that
> no actual changes take place and you can see what it would do.
>
> Apart from preventing hijacking old download/homepage-referenced domains
> it has the nice side effect that it speeds up the installation of your
> package because no 3rd party crawling needs to take place.  Given some
> streamlining, a tool like this could be advertised on pypi.python.org or
> offered directly as an action in the server UI for package authors.

First, thank you for doing something to help with the situation!

Second, this is just an idea and not a request for you personally,
perhaps someone could make a tool that browses existing external links
(either from PyPI releases or the command line) looking for
downloadables, matches them to releases on PyPI, and then uploads them
to that release.  People could then use it to upload their past
releases, *and* to handle future releases in an automated fashion.

Bonus points if it's a distutils/setuptools command class, so that
people can do "setup.py register upload_externals" as a single command
to automate the PyPI publishing part of their release process.  ;-)