[Distutils] Optimizing easy-install upgrade

[Jim Fulton]

Suppose I have the directory:

   /home/jim/tmp/dist:
   used 92 available 41345796
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   671 Jun 19 17:43 demoneeded-1.0-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   672 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.1-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.2-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.3-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.4-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.5-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.6-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.7-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.8-py2.4.egg
   -rw-rw-r--  1 jim jim   673 Jun 19 17:46 demoneeded-1.9-py2.4.egg

and then run easy install telling it to install something I already have:

   [jim at ds9 ~]$ /usr/local/python/2.4/bin/easy_install -d tmp/dist -mxU demoneeded==1.1
   Searching for demoneeded==1.1
   Reading http://www.python.org/pypi/demoneeded/
   Couldn't find index page for 'demoneeded' (maybe misspelled?)
   Scanning index of all packages (this may take a while)
   Reading http://www.python.org/pypi/
   Best match: demoneeded 1.1
   Processing demoneeded-1.1-py2.4.egg

   Using /home/jim/tmp/dist/demoneeded-1.1-py2.4.egg

   Because this distribution was installed --multi-version, before you can
   import modules from this package in an application, you will need to
   'import pkg_resources' and then use a 'require()' call similar to one of
   these examples, in order to select the desired version:

       pkg_resources.require("demoneeded")  # latest installed version
       pkg_resources.require("demoneeded==1.1")  # this exact version
       pkg_resources.require("demoneeded>=1.1")  # this version or higher


   Note also that the installation directory must be on sys.path at runtime for
   this to work.  (e.g. by being the application's script directory, by being on
   PYTHONPATH, or by being added to sys.path by your code.)

   Processing dependencies for demoneeded==1.1

Note that it looked at pypi even though it already had the only acceptable
version.  I'm not sure why it did this.  Is this just a case of a missing
optimization?  Or is there some other reason for checking the index in
a situation like this?

I have some scripts that invoke easy_setup and I'd like to try to
do some of this logic myself.  Given a requirement, I'd like to
get the specifiers and decide myself whether to invoke easy_install.
I have 2 problems:

- I don't want to parse the requirement myself, but, rather,
   use Requirement.parse.  If I use Requirement.parse, I can use
   the specs attribute to get the specifiers, however, this
   attribute isn't documented.  Should I assume that it is
   private? Or is it safe to use.

- I'm still a bit foggy on how to interpret the specifiers.
   But we're discussing that in another thread.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton           mailto:jim at zope.com       Python Powered!
CTO                  (540) 361-1714            http://www.python.org
Zope Corporation     http://www.zope.com       http://www.zope.org