[Distutils] How to get list of package requirements from PyPI without downloading egg?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:36 PM 10/26/2006 -0600, Jeremy Kloth wrote:
>On Thursday 26 October 2006 1:14 pm, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> > (Btw, do you have a documentation
> > link?  Google doesn't turn up anything except API docs that say nothing
> > about the PEP 314 stuff.)
>
>http://skew.org/~mike/4suite-docs/html/modules/Ft.Lib.DistExt.Dist.html#Dist
>
>or (as always, "Read the source, Luke"):
>
>http://cvs.4suite.org/viewcvs/4Suite/Ft/Lib/DistExt/Dist.py?view=markup

I'm still lost.  What are you *doing* with the requires, provides, and 
obsoletes fields, other than storing or outputting them?  There's nothing 
in the doc or the source linked above that actually *does* anything with 
the data that I can see.  How do you use this to find and install 
dependencies, for example?