[Distutils] [Catalog-sig] Prototype setuptools-specific PyPI index.

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:37 PM 7/24/2007 -0400, Noah Gift wrote:
>The basic algorithm is that a local index of PyPi could be kept in one
>file.  If an incorrect search was made, the first action to occur
>would be to check if the local file was the same as the file on the
>server.  If not, it would sync the changes with svn.  Then
>easy_install would try to do lookups against the local file to find a
>match.

Note that there are a lot of ways you can implement something like 
this without even involving me on the client or Martin on the 
server.  For example, setuptools.package_index uses urllib2 for all 
its URL access, so installing an "opener" that does caching before 
invoking easy_install is possible.  You can also subclass the 
easy_install command class and the PackageIndex class, or tell the 
easy_install command class to use a different PackageIndex implementation.

In the long run, I'd like to add some entry points to allow people to 
extend the search mechanism in such ways, but for now you can 
certainly hack subclasses easily enough and make your own alternative 
commands, as Jim has done for integrating zc.buildout with setuptools.