[Distutils] Easy Install source download

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:48 AM 7/23/2005 +0200, Vincenzo Di Massa wrote:
>Hi,
>I'm developing an easy_install based packager.
>It will create distribution specific packages containing eggs. (deb, rpm...)
>
>I would like to generate source packages from which binary egg-packages are
>built.
>
>I spent one day looking at setuptools code, but I did not find how to force
>easy_install to download a source distribution even if an egg is available.
>
>I think package_index has code I can call to download just the tar.gz or zip
>source... but how?

Just give easy_install the URL of the source archive.  You can use a 
standalone PackageIndex to do your PyPI search ahead of time; just use the 
find_packages() method, then do something similar to what the obtain() 
function does to iterate over the available packages.  A package with a 
precedence of SOURCE_DIST or CHECKOUT_DIST is presumably what you want, and 
its 'location' attribute will be what you should give to easy_install.

(Note that what I'm saying is correct only for the CVS HEAD (0.6a0) of 
setuptools, not the released 0.5 versions, which don't have a 'location' 
attribute or CHECKOUT_DIST precedence.)