[Distutils] Mystery solved

[Jim Fulton]

On Jul 10, 2006, at 6:22 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> At 05:58 PM 7/10/2006 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
>
>> On Jul 10, 2006, at 5:50 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>> ...
>>>
>>>> 2. The messages:
>>>>
>>>>        Couldn't find index page for 'jimtest' (maybe misspelled?)
>>>>        Scanning index of all packages (this may take a while)
>>>>
>>>>     should be info messages, not warning messages.  If they
>>>>     remain warnings, and you fix the first problem, it will be
>>>>     impossible to avoid the warnings without creating a PyPI
>>>>     project or creating an index server, and I don't think it was
>>>>     your intent to require either of these.  I don't think a  
>>>> warning
>>>>     should be issues for correct use of software.
>>>
>>> Here's the problem.  Reducing everything to info messages means
>>> there's effectively no control over output detail.  I generally use
>>> 'warn()' for things that *may* reflect an error in input
>>> parameters.  So, my take on the above is that although the
>>> "Scanning" message could become an info(), the previous one  
>>> shouldn't.
>>
>> This means that one always has to use an index.  In which case, what
>> is the point of find-links?
>
> The point of --find-links is to provide links to unindexed packages.

But if you use an unindexed package, you'll get a warning.

IMO, you should not get a warning for correct use of software. Users
should try to make warnings go away.  If you give people warnings that
they shouldn't make go away, then they are more likely to ignore  
warnings
that you don't want them to.

Either you can't have valid unindexed software, or setuptools shouldn't
generate a warning if software isn't in the index.

I really find the distinction between indexes and find-links rather  
puzzling.
Personally, I'd like to find a way to merge these two concepts into one
by choosing a definition of an index that admits a directory full of
distributions. Then we could get rid of the find-links concept and allow
0 or more indexes to be used.  This would be much simpler and cleaner
IMO.

Jim

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