[Distutils] distlib updated - comments sought

[Daniel Holth]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 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?

IIRC the most practical limitation is that the XML-RPC interface
doesn't exist on the mirrors.