[Catalog-sig] A 90% Solution

[PJ Eby]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 8:28 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> On 12.03.2013 00:39, Donald Stufft wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 11, 2013, at 7:04 PM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Just a thought, but...
>>>
>>> If 90% of PyPI projects do not have any external files to download,
>>> then, wouldn't it make sense to:
>>
>> To be accurate it's 90% don't have any files/release available *only* externally. Most have external  files to download because it's very rare that a project doesn't include an home_page or a download_url, especially since distutils complains if you don't.
>
> How are you going to verify that disabling the links
> on those projects won't make certain release versions of
> those packages unavailable for pip/easy_install ?

I'm not sure if you're asking Donald or me here.  My proposal was to
only automatically disable the rel attributes for links to pages that
do *not* contain any easy_install or pip-able download links.  So, by
definition, this would not make any releases unavailable.

As for what Donald is proposing, I honestly have no idea what he's
talking about, or whether the 90% statistic actually applies for what
I'm proposing.

So it's possible that it might be a lot less than 90% that my proposal
would be able to affect *instantly*, without contacting any authors.


> How are you planing to inform the package authors of that
> change, so that they can take corrective action ?
>
> Which options would be available for authors ?

Do see my proposal again, which was simply that there be a switch to
enable or disable the rel attributes, that it default off for new
packages, and be switched to off for exactly that set of packages
which would not result in the loss of access to any download files.

There is, at this point, the question of how to handle projects that
have some of their releases hosted externally, or with some of the
files external and some not.  I would prefer that any automated
changeover apply only to packages where the set of discoverable links
is exactly equal to the links found on the project's /simple page.


> Regarding the links, it's probably better to not
> remove the rel="" attributes but instead change them
> from rel="download" to e.g. rel="external-download";
> or to keep the old index semantics around as /simple-v1/.
> This keeps the valuable semantic relation available for
> tools that want to use it.

For what?  If you must keep them, rel="disabled-homepage" etc. would
get the message across.  But I really don't see the point, and I
*invented* the bloody things.

Frankly, I'm more than prepared to toss the rel attributes altogether,
after adequate notice is given for people to move their files or links
to the files.  I just don't want any changes in the *rest* of the
/simple generation algorithm.