[Catalog-sig] pre-PEP: transition to release-file hosting at pypi site

[holger krekel]

Hi again,

A correction on one point of my last mail to you,

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 10:02 +0000, holger krekel wrote:
> > My suggestion would be to do two things:
> > 
> > First, make the state a boolean: crawl external links, with the
> > current state yes and the future state no, with "no" simply meaning
> > that the rel="" attribute is removed from the links that currently
> > have it.
> > 
> > Second, propose to offer tools in the PyPI interface (and command
> > line) to assist authors in making the transition, rather than
> > proposing a completely unspecified caching mechanism.  Better to have
> > some vaguely specified tools than a completely unspecified caching
> > mechanism, and better still to spell out very precisely what those
> > tools do.
> 
> This structure makes sense to me except that i see the need to start off with
> "pypi-ext", i.e. a third state which encodes the current behaviour.

Wait, your suggestion of a boolean "crawl external" set to yes
would encode the current behaviour, so my "except" is invalid.

> Thing is that the pypi.python.org doesn't have an extensive test 
> suite and we will thus need to rely on a few early adopters 
> using the tools/state-changes before starting phase 2 (mass mailings etc.).
> Also in case of problems we can always switch back packages to the safe
> "pypi-ext" mode.  IOW, the motiviation for this third state is considering
> the actual implementation process.

This can also be done with your two-state suggestion (switching back 
to crawl=yes).  So no disagreement on that either.

best,
holger