[Distutils] Error downloading pythonutils from pypi: Can't process plain .py files

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 03:41 PM 12/18/2008 -0700, Jason R. Coombs wrote:
>Should I post a bug in bugtracker on this issue?

No.  easy_install requires that a URL path ends with the target 
filename.  It *must* be able to determine what it's downloading 
BEFORE it actually downloads it, since it would otherwise have to 
download every possible file for a package in order to determine 
which one was a suitable version, python version, platform, etc.  And 
it's not reasonable to expect it to grow special cases for every site 
that wants to hide the filename in the query string attached to a CGI script.

If someone needs to have their files processed by a script, they 
could always make the path something like:

   downman.py/pythonutils-0.2.3.zip

Using either PATH_INFO or mod_rewrite or something similar, at which 
point easy_install can tell it's looking at a source zipfile, rather 
than a .py script.