[Distutils] Distutils integration

[Andrew M. Kuchling]

T-Mithy Myddletin writes:
>might be interested know that I have tonight added a bunch of new
>fields to the Vaults of Parnassus database...

One field that might be interesting is, for lack of a better name, a
'status' field that said whether a project is maintained or
unmaintained.  (Maybe Maintained: yes|no ...)  Sometimes it's useful
to find any code that's helpful, even if no one is keeping it
up-to-date; it's a starting point, anyway.

>I don't know if this is motivation or not, but Vaults of Parnassus is
>ready (and even eagre) to attempt some sort of integration with
>Distutils distributions whenever Distutils is ready to be adopted. In
>time we might even be able to work up a little client of some sort,
>like Perl has, for easy searching, downloading, and install.

I think that would be possible without too much difficulty; the major
issue, besides user interface, is where to find the latest tarball
containing the actual code; Parnassus points to human-readable Web
pages, not directly to the .tgz file, and it probably shouldn't have a
pointer to it.  How does CPAN handle this?  Does it list foo-*.tgz and
take the one where * is the highest version number?

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/
I confidently expect it to be a fairly resounding failure.
    -- John Cleese, on the Monty Python reunion planned for 1999