[Distutils] "Safe" Project Names and underscores in Project Names issue

[Michael]

 Forgive me if I ask a stupid question but what characters are allowed 
 in a project name on PyPI and by Distribute/Setuptools?
 I specifically ask because of what I think is a problem I found with 
 Distribute/Setuptools with the underscore character ("_")

 It seems PyPI allows underscore as a valid character in a project name 
 and as such there are projects like pyramid_beaker, django_email_auth. 
 Distributes' behaviour is to replace all underscores to dashes using the 
 safe_name function 
 (https://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/src/611910892a04/pkg_resources.py#cl-1135). 
 Project name is registered with dashes in the egg (i.e pyramid-beaker) 
 and nowhere is the original name stored.

 It seems, following lead Pip has adjusted its code accordingly 
 (https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/ea60bb79b5f837f0aa36d2354415dbcca5368afe/pip/index.py#L317) 
 As such, modifying the safe_name method to recognize undescore breaks 
 pip.

 Doing "pip install pyramid_beaker" installs the package successfully 
 however any package tools (i.e pip) report the project as 
 "pyramid-beaker" and as such becomes unusable name if PyPI is queried 
 via RPC Interfaces. Trying to turn all the dashes back underscores 
 breaks packages that have underscores in them (i.e. 
 sphinxcontrib-programoutput). And if the package were to use both, it 
 would be impossible to determine what it is without running all the 
 permutations.

 I would appreciate if any one could advise me on this matter and let me 
 know if this is a bug underscore treatment with Distribute/Setuptools, 
 pip or PyPI.


 Here is the test code to reproduce the problem (in a virtualenv):

 1. Setup a test virtualenv with "--distribute --no-site-packages" and 
 activate it

 2. Install following packages:

 pip install --ignore-installed --no-deps pyramid_beaker
 pip install --ignore-installed --no-deps sphinxcontrib-programoutput

 3. Save and run the following script that uses pip and XMLRPC to check 
 for new versions:
 --------------------------------
 import xmlrpclib
 import pip

 pypi = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://pypi.python.org/pypi')
 for dist in pip.get_installed_distributions():
     available = pypi.package_releases(dist.project_name)
     if not available:
         # Try to capitalize pkg name
         available = 
 pypi.package_releases(dist.project_name.capitalize())

     if not available:
         msg = 'no releases at pypi'
     elif available[0] != dist.version:
         msg = '{} available'.format(available[0])
     else:
         msg = 'up to date'
     pkg_info = '{dist.project_name} {dist.version}'.format(dist=dist)
     print '{pkg_info:40} {msg}'.format(pkg_info=pkg_info, msg=msg)

 ---------------------------------

 Output (specific to installed packages):

 sphinxcontrib-programoutput 0.4.1        up to date
 pyramid-beaker 0.5                       no releases at pypi

 [pyramid-beaker does not exist on PyPI, since its pyramid_beaker)


 Expected output (mind the underscores)

 sphinxcontrib-programoutput 0.4.1        up to date
 pyramid_beaker 0.5                       up to date

 ---- Additional info ---
 pyramid_beaker-0.5-py2.7.egg-info/PKG-INFO shows that the project name 
 is:

 Name: pyramid-beaker