[Catalog-sig] Publishing metadata (was: V2 pre-PEP: transitioning to release file hosting on PYPI)

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 14.03.2013 07:25, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:19 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 1:23 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>>> On 13.03.2013 07:28, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 12:59 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>>>>> I think we should establish a versioned API like that for PyPI
>>>>> to make progress easier. All major web APIs use versioning
>>>>> for this reason.
>>>>
>>>> Why set up versioning for something we want to phase out? There will
>>>> never be a simple-v3, so this is really overengineering the proposed
>>>> change.
>>>
>>> Who says that we want to phase out the /simple/ index ?
>>
>> I want to render it redundant, because it's a crazy way to distribute
>> completely inadequate metadata.
> 
> Specifically, once we have the infrastructure in place to publish
> metadata v2.0 (or a suitable subset) to installation tools, the
> relatively impoverished contents of the simple index will be a legacy
> interface retained only to preserve the correct operation of existing
> tools.

Those two are orthogonal.

The index itself is just a bag of things and, as such, one that's very
well suited to publish data, since it can easily be exposed in form
of static files, which can be put on a CDNs or mirrored using
rsync.

It's easy to add the metadata file to that index for tools to
pick up - in addition to the other data exposed on the index
pages and perfectly backwards compatible.

As mentioned before, I think we should start publishing the
existing metadata stored in the PyPI database on those
index pages as PKG-INFO files, so that tools can easily
access the data without having to go through XML-RPC.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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