[Distutils] easy_install prefers source?

[Nathan R. Yergler]

Forwarding to the list because I wasn't smart enough to "reply-all"...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nathan R. Yergler <nathan at yergler.net>
Date: Feb 27, 2007 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: [Distutils] easy_install prefers source?
To: "Phillip J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com>


> >c:\...>easy_install lxml==1.1
> >
> >attempts to retrieve the source distribution rather than the available
> >Windows binary egg for PyPI.
>
> What windows binary egg for PyPI?  If you mean the one for 1.1, the problem
> is that easy_install isn't reading that page, because it's a "hidden"
> version.  See:

Yes, I meant the one for 1.1; I assumed (incorrectly, obviously) that
by specifying the version, easy_install would look at that particular
version page in PyPI if it existed.

>
> $ python -m easy_install -nvv lxml==1.1
> Searching for lxml==1.1

[snip]

> Downloading http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxml-1.1.tgz
>
>
> >   Is this the expected behavior?  I would
> >have expected easy_install to prefer binary eggs.
>
> It only prefers what it finds, and currently it won't find Cheeseshop files
> for "hidden" versions of a pacakge unless you include a -f to that page,
> e.g. -f http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/lxml/1.1 in this case.

Prefering what it finds makes sense, although *I* would prefer that it
found the page on PyPI with the egg ;).  Is the "hiding" of versions a
Cheeseshop thing?  Is there a good reason *not* to look for the
requested version page on Cheeseshop? (I'm guessing the answer to this
is "we don't look for pages, we use an RPC interface [for some
definition of RPC]", but I'll ask anyway)

Thanks,

Nathan