[Distutils] some questions about PEP470

[Donald Stufft]

> On Oct 11, 2014, at 2:27 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> 
>>>> And that the affected users can only do that if the respective
>>>> maintainers of the projects offer an external index (or re-upload to PyPI)?
>>> 
>>> No and Yes.
>>> 
>>> Wherever pip/easy_install are currently finding the download from can serve
>>> as the external index. This likely won’t be the most efficient repository
>>> since often times these are regular web pages which have other content and
>>> the like but it won’t be any worse than it is currently. For instance you
>>> can take a look at https://bpaste.net/show/5a83985ad2e6 to see using the
>>> current page as a find-links repository with pip.
>> 
>> How can affected users discover they need to use this particular option
>> and URL if they use today's pip/easy_install versions and a post PEP470 PyPI?
> 
> I plan to put the external repositories (and the commands needed to use them)
> in the UI for PyPI. I suppose I should put that in the PEP as well, I was more
> focused on defining the API differences and the changes.

I forgot to mention, one other thing I thought about, we could move the current
external links to external repositories automatically. I’m not sure if this is
a good idea because on some projects that will end up with a giant list of things
that a user would be suggested to install. Perhaps it’d work to scan them for
installable files and only move the ones where an installable file was discovered,
though that could be error prone (for example right now bytereef.org is down, so
we’d not discover any files there).

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Donald Stufft
PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA