[Distutils] Prototype setuptools-specific PyPI index.

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:04 PM 7/23/2007 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> > But by definition, the people typing the names of the dependencies into
> > a 'setup.py' for such a plugin *are* Python programmers, and could be
> > expected to know about case sensitivity.
> >
> > I don't think Jim was areguing that human-centric *search* should punish
> > misspellings, but rather that encouraging such sloppiness in other
> > packages is a misfeature, especially if supporting it induces a tax on
> > *all* users of automated dependency resolution.
>
>Right. I think Phillip is primarily talking about package names as
>specified on the command line of easy_install.
>
>So if your concern is about package names specified in dependencies,
>one solution could be that setuptools distinguishes whether to apply
>case corrections and normalization, depending on whether it was an
>end-user-typed name or a programmer-specified one.
>
>What I don't know is how difficult that would be to implement, and
>what volunteer is supposed to implement it if it were easy/possible,
>so I by no means propose that such a solution should be implemented,
>even if it would solve the problem.

Yes, especially since compatibility with the existing installation 
base requires case insensitivity, because on case-insensitive 
platforms easy_install already normalizes the case of filenames it 
creates.  So, the question of what the "right thing" to do is in the 
abstract has already been moot for a year or two.