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

[Jason R. Coombs]

Phillip,
	Thanks for your response.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Phillip J. Eby [mailto:pje at telecommunity.com]
> Sent: Thursday, 18 December, 2008 21:59
> 
> ...  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.

I absolutely agree it's not reasonable to grow special cases... but the RFCs
do provide a standard for describing the content disposition.  Perhaps it
would be worthwhile to handle that general case.  Specifically, one could
request the headers for a given URL to determine if a content-disposition
filename is supplied.

I've put together some sample code which is short, robust, and clean (I
hope).  This code demonstrates how one might go about querying the
content-disposition.  See it at:

http://paste.turbogears.org/paste/19813

With that code, the filename_test code could go something like this:

filename = get_content_disposition_filename(url) or
get_filename_the_old_way(url)
test_valid_egg_distro(filename)

... or alternatively, one could only perform the content-disposition
retrieval when the filename _appears_ to be invalid.

> 
> 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.

While I agree it's unreasonable for setuptools to have to grow to handle
nonstandard cases, I would say the same argument applies to the content
providers.  They shouldn't have to alter their deployment architecture to
accommodate limitations in setuptools, particularly when they're following
the web standards.

The above solution handles the general case where files can be served
through many different content management systems and not just as static
file references in the URL.  This allows for special urls like
http://www.mycompany.com/myproject/latest_distro.jsp, which might generate
the content dynamically.  Note that the voidspace author is not attempting
to "hide" the filename in the get parameters.  He's probably using a sort of
content management system.

Would you consider a patch that incorporates this more robust behavior?

Regards,
Jason
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