[Distutils] easy_install installing beta version of psycopg2

[Mark Sienkiewicz]

P.J. Eby wrote:
>> the shortcomings of a package manager
>
> Well, technically, this'd be a feature.  Granted, it's only a feature 
> for users of projects whose maintainers are *not* keeping a 
> well-groomed PyPI page.  ;-)


easy_install has significant market penetration.  If you make 
easy_install believe the meta-data, then you give the project 
maintainers some incentive to get their meta-data right.  That seems 
more desirable than the current scenario, where a well-behaved project 
is inconvenienced.

I understand that easy_install has to do a balancing act between 
enabling bad behaviour by the project maintainers (i.e. it has to work 
with poorly maintained projects for the benefit of the users) and 
encouraging good behaviour by the project maintainers (again for the 
benefit of the users).  I just think it is acceptable to give the 
projects a little incentive to get it right.


>
> Unfortunately, even if I fixed that today, it wouldn't have ANY effect 
> on 99% of the field installations of any Python package management 
> tools: there are still people using 4 or 5 year old versions of 
> easy_install, and a lot of people use Distribute (via their OS 
> install), which is a year behind the setuptools trunk on various 
> things.  Most other Python package management solutions are based on 
> top of easy_install in one way or another, as well.

If you fix it now, the fixed version might well displace the earlier 
versions in another 4 or 5 years.  If not, you might be having this same 
discussion again in 4 or 5 years.