[Distutils] [Catalog-sig] Specification for package indexes?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 07:41 PM 7/7/2006 +1000, richardjones at optusnet.com.au wrote:
> > 3. It assumes that going to baseURL directly will result in a page with
> > links to all available packages in the form described in #2.
>
>This has been removed as it seems completely unnecessary (a flat listing 
>of all 1400+ packages, that is). The XML-RPC interface provides the 
>functionality you require here.

Note that this will BREAK easy_install in the field, as it will no longer 
be possible for easy_install to find packages with odd punctuation in their 
names,  or which the user has incorrectly specified the case of.  E.g. if 
someone asks for "sqlobject" instead of "SQLObject", it will no longer work.

This is a pretty serious breakage.

If you really *must* remove this, then you need to add name 
canonicalization so that going to /pypi/sqlobject works the same as 
/pypi/SQLObject.  Similarly, going to "/pypi/foo-bar" should work the same 
as "/pypi/Foo & Bar", and so on.  That is, a case-insensitive, 
"safe_name()" match (see pkg_resources code or docs for the definition of 
safe_name()).

If you can't support this (which I've previously asked you to over the last 
year so that I could remove the list dependency), PLEASE put the package 
list back, because you just broke easy_install's ability to support user 
friendly names.

You've known for a *year* that easy_install depended on this feature of PyPI:

    http://mail.python.org/pipermail/catalog-sig/2005-June/000654.html

If you needed it to go away, giving me some notice would have been 
nice.  Not just to me, but to all the people who use PyPI via 
easy_install.  This gratuitous breakage is not nice.