[Distutils] Re: CPAN functionality for python - requirements

[Bruce Sass]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 10:13:51AM +0100, Jack Jansen wrote:
> >Well, one of the things I'd like to do is integrate all this in MacPython IDE,
> >and the same probably holds for PythonWin and Idle. Then the "what do you
> >have" is pretty useful for building menus and such.
>
> I anticipate having a web-based interface to the database as well.  I'm
> sure that we can get the CGI to let the user do that sort of search, but
> at the moment it's restricted so that the user has to specify the name
> of the package they're looking for.  I figured dumping gigabytes across
> some user's line wouldn't be optimal.  ;-)

Gigabytes?

~$ avail=/var/lib/dpkg/available
~$ du -h $avail
3.4M    /var/lib/dpkg/available
~$ grep Package: $avail | wc -l
   4698

An entry in Debian's available DB looks like this...

Package: python-zlib
Priority: optional
Section: interpreters
Installed-Size: 80
Maintainer: Gregor Hoffleit <flight at debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Source: python
Version: 1.5.2-10
Depends: python-base (= 1.5.2-10), libc6 (>= 2.1.2), libz1
Filename: dists/potato/main/binary-i386/interpreters/python-zlib_1.5.2-10.deb
Size: 16578
MD5sum: 7226b0d0edf21374c1b09295c0d9497b
Description: A compression module for Python using zlib.
 A compression module for Python using the zlib library. zlib
 implements the deflate compression method used in gzip and
 pkzip.

...megabytes perhaps.  Of course if someone is querying for what is
available they should be expecting a lot of information.

Killing two birds with one stone...
It's not quite as bad as you think.
If the server can spit out a file containing the above info for each
package, you are partially apt-get-able; the other part is returning
the properly formatted package when you get a request for the
Filename: URI.


- Bruce