[Distutils] pypi simple page for setuptools returning 11034 links

[Paul Moore]

On 6 October 2014 11:59, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> On Oct 6, 2014, at 6:39 AM, Joost Molenaar <j.j.molenaar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> When I run `pip list --outdated` on my raspberry pi, pip seems to hang on
>> setuptools. Investigating a bit, I found that currently, there are 11034 links being
>> returned [1], weighing 1379 KiB. Many of these are links to issue pages on github and
>> bitbucket, also, many of these links are duplicated 20-25 times.
>>
>> Is this normal/expected? Is it a bug, if so, should I file it somewhere?
>
> It’s normal in that it’s what PyPI has always done and changing it requires
> going through a process.
>
> It just so happens that I’ve started that process (see PEP 470!) and
> hopefully this will change in the near future :)

Having said that, I find the PyPI page for setuptools (which is the
long_description field, which is where all those links come from) to
be annoyingly long and unhelpful.

Can I suggest that it would be helpful if setuptools removed some of
the ancient history from the PyPI page? Possibly even replace the huge
changelog with a link to the changelog file, rather than having it all
inline? That would make the PyPI page more readable and usable, and as
a fortuitous side-effect, remove all the useless links from the pypi
simple page.

(You could file a request like that as a bug report on the setuptools tracker).

Paul