[Distutils] distlib updated - comments sought

[Vinay Sajip]

Paul Moore <p.f.moore <at> gmail.com> writes:

> The first ones are fine, as they point to files. The second is often a
> file, and seems to frequently duplicate the first. I'm not sure how
> useful it is. The final one often points to a further webpage - I
> presume that's what you plan to scrape. That's where the issue lies,
> though, as at least some of those links time out (lxml's does, IIRC)
> and as I say, I don't think I know of a case where it's actually worth
> doing.
> 
> But this is based on a very superficial and limited experience. I'll
> happily bow to better information.
> 
> On the other hand, is manually parsing the static page any faster in a
> practical sense than using XMLRPC?

Well, XML-RPC is of course preferable; the current code in distlib is just
whatever I copied across from packaging, but the next step will be to look
at the releases which are available from the different sources (XML-RPC,
PyPI metadata URLs, dependency_links etc.) to see what sorts of things wouldn't
be accessible if we restricted to say, just using XML-RPC. Since all the
information in the static pages seems to be available via XML-RPC, what is the
point of the simple interface, other than for occasional viewing by a human?

Regards,

Vinay Sajip