[Catalog-sig] V2 pre-PEP: transitioning to release file hosting on PYPI

[PJ Eby]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 2:07 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> Just a quick note (more later, if time permits)...
>
> On 12.03.2013 18:05, holger krekel wrote:
>> Hi Marc-Andre, all,
>>
>>>> - Prepare PYPI implementation to allow a per-project "hosting mode",
>>>>   effectively enabling or disabling external crawling.  When enabled
>>>>   nothing changes from the current situation of producing ``rel=download``
>>>>   and ``rel=homepage`` attributed links on ``simple/`` pages,
>>>>   causing installers to crawl those sites.
>>>>   When disabled, the attributions of links will change
>>>>   to ``rel=newdownload`` and ``rel=newhomepage`` causing installers to
>>>>   avoid crawling 3rd party sites.  Retaining the meta-information allows
>>>>   tools to still make use of the semantic information.
>>>
>>> Please start using versioned APIs for these things. The
>>> old style index should still be available under some
>>> URL, e.g. /simple-v1/ or /v1/simple/ or /1/simple/
>>
>> Not sure it is neccessary in this case.  I would think it makes
>> the implementation harder and it would probably break PEP381 (mirroring
>> infrastructure) as well.
>
> Here's what I meant:
>
> We publish the current implementation of the /simple/ index API
> under a new URL /simple-v1/, so that people that want to use
> the old API can continue to do so.

Do you know of anyone who's *actually* going to need/use this
alternate API.  Why can't they just the XML-RPC API, the DOAP API, or
any other means of obtaining this information?

Heck, the proposal to just change the value of the rel attribute isn't
going to stop anybody from using that data.  Please let's not
complicate this by adding more API formats for PyPI to support..