[Distutils] does pypi or red-dove have a better firehose API than "download all the packages"?

[Vinay Sajip]

Donald Stufft <donald <at> stufft.io> writes:

> Most packages also have an egg-info inside of them you can parse.

I don't know how accurate that information is - IIRC pip always runs
egg-info on downloaded archives. I presume this is to get the correct
dependencies which are relevant to the installation system.

The red-dove metadata is not always completely accurate since it depends on
the specific environment the metadata scan runs in (most issues come from
dependencies which differ according to Python version, but there could be
OS-specific dependencies too which I'm not capturing). I view this
automatically generated metadata as a stop-gap until better metadata comes
along; I needed to experiment with metadata formats and migration approaches
with real data. No doubt there will be tools to help migrate setup.py
metadata to alternative metadata formats as my code currently does, by which
I mean tools that users can run on their own machines so I can get some
sleep at night :-)

Regards,

Vinay Sajip