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

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:52 AM 7/7/2006 -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>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.

It looks like easy_install is still actually working at the moment; I guess 
that means you kept the list working if the user-agent is 
easy_install.  Thank you, and sorry for jumping to conclusions.  I took 
"This has been removed" to mean that it had been, well, removed.  :)

I will mention again, though, that it *can* be removed entirely, without 
needing any in-the-field upgrades, if project name matches in URLs can be 
made case-insensitive and canonical via safe_name:

def safe_name(name):
     """Convert an arbitrary string to a standard distribution name

     Any runs of non-alphanumeric/. characters are replaced with a single '-'.
     """
     return re.sub('[^A-Za-z0-9.]+', '-', name)

If you can fall back to matching safe_name(pkg_name).lower() against 
search_name.lower() if the URL is not exact, then easy_install will not 
need the full package listing *or* the XML-RPC interface.  It will work 
as-is in the field today, with no patching required.  The only thing the 
full package listing is used for is to do this search.  (Likewise, it 
would've been the main thing the XML-RPC API would've been used for.)