[Distutils] easy_install: package index

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:01 PM 7/3/2005 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
>I notice there is an option for the index URL.  But it doesn't look like
>a multi-option, i.e., you can't give several URLs, to be checked in
>turn.

-f /--find-links does this; it takes whitespace separated URLs, but they 
have to be of pages that have direct links to downloadable packages.  I'm 
not sure how I could make something that would be sane in the presence of 
conflicting information between multiple PyPI-like indexes.


>   That would be useful.  It'd also be nice if you could configure
>this; for instance, there's several libraries I'm using that haven't had
>proper releases yet, so they aren't in PyPI.  If I could tell someone to
>just add a particular line to ~/.setup.cfg or somesuch, then that would
>make it easier.  Maybe that's already possible?  But that'd be no good
>if that disabled the use of PyPI.

It's ~/.pydistutils.cfg, and you want to put this in it:

[easy_install]
find_links = url_of_download_page1
              url_of_download_page2
              ...

This will only disable PyPI for requests that can be met using links found 
on the listed pages.  And if you use the --upgrade flag, it'll scan PyPI 
anyway, and take the latest and best version (given the request it's trying 
to fulfill) from whichever place it was found.

Note, by the way, that these links don't have to be maintained by the 
authors; you can make one page for e.g. Paste, that has direct links to all 
the project distributions somebody needs, and just let them put that in 
their config or use it with -f.

The only real downside to putting things in find_links is that the web 
pages have to be read each time you run easy_install.  Maybe somebody could 
contribute some caching code and we could cache the pages locally up to a 
certain age.