[Distutils] easy_install installing beta version of psycopg2

[Daniele Varrazzo]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 8:40 PM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 05:47 PM 2/16/2011 +0000, Daniele Varrazzo wrote:
>>
>> Do I, as a packager, have the possibility to say "what I have specified
>> on PyPI as stable release is exactly what I mean"?
>
> If you don't want easy_install to find it, don't list it on the pages
> referred to in your "Home Page" or "Download URL" on PyPI.  Easy_install
> reads those pages because many package authors do not provide directly
> usable URLs or packages on PyPI.

I'm sorry, it is obvious that I have not spent so much time into this
problem as the designer of this feature. But it still don't get the
rationale behind discarding available, non-ambiguous metadata in
favour of screen scraping.

I don't think it is fair to ask to stop listing the beta from the
homepage and the download page of the 2-pages website of the module:
how should I advertise there is a beta around and testing is welcome?
It won't happen that the shortcomings of a package manager will
dictate the content of a website: I find more viable the option to
tell users to stay away from easy_install and install from the sdist,
or to suggest an alternative package manager with a more robust
behaviour - if I found any.

>> possibly not requiring a writable egg cache (see
>
> You can prevent this as a package author, by specifying zip_safe=False in
> your setup() script.

psycopg2 is not zip_safe, as it contains a C extension. Yes, sounds
fishy, but I've not stumbled in the issue myself to debug it. I only
see people reporting the problem and the solution. Will ask further
info to the author of the article quoted.

-- Daniele