[Distutils] easy_install: setup.py-less packages

[Ryan Tomayko]

>> Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>> You then publish your wrapping package as a subversion URL.  This  
>>> won't
>>> work for auto-discovery from PyPI unless your URL ends with  
>>> Flup.egg or
>>> something like that, but you can always give it to EasyInstall as  
>>> a URL,
>>> or build eggs and publish those.
>>

> Ian Bicking wrote:
>> Yes.  Hmm... I suppose I could create something that redirected  
>> from a
>> detectable URL to the actual URL.  That's kind of hacky though.  Only
>> being able to list actual eggs decreases the utility of a custom  
>> index.
>>   Could it also look at title attributes or something?
>>
>> It would be neat if you could download a working development copy  
>> with
>> easy_install too.  I'd like to encourage, or at least assist,  
>> people who
>> want to interact with the code itself; and if you use a checkout  
>> you can
>> at least use things like svn diff, even if you can't necessarily  
>> commit.
>>

Ryan Tomayko wrote:
> That's interesting. If you could point to subversion repositories  
> from an index page, you could throw a page somewhere with a big  
> list of project subversion URLs that use some kind of convention on  
> naming...
>
>   <a href="http://example.com/svn/foo/trunk/">foo-devel</a>
>   <a href="http://example2.com/svn/bar/trunk/">bar-devel</a>

That's going to be ambiguous though, right. How do you know those  
URLs are subversion repositories without having to go out and HEAD  
each resource or something.

We can use the rel attribute:

      <a href="http://example.com/svn/foo/trunk/" rel="subversion">
      foo-devel
      </a>

 From the HTML 4.01 specification, rel attribute [1]:
> This attribute describes the relationship from the current
> document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The
> value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.

 From the HTML 4.01 specification, link-types [2]:
> Authors may wish to define additional link types not described
> in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile
> to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see
> the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#adef-rel
[2]: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links

Ryan Tomayko
                                  rtomayko at gmail.com
                                  http://naeblis.cx/rtomayko/