PEP 301 -- Package Index and Metadata for Distutils

[Thomas Heller]

"Steve Cassidy" <steve.cassidy at mq.edu.au> writes:

> On Fri, 08 Nov 2002 16:43:12 +1100, Richard Jones wrote:
> 
> > This PEP proposes several extensions to the Distutils packaging
> > system.  These enhancements include a central package index
> > server, tools for submitting package information to the index and
> > extensions to the package metadata to include Trove information.
> > 
> 
> If you'll pardon an intrusion from over the fence in comp.lang.tcl,
> it's very interesting that this proposal and the related ones share
> a lot in common with my own TIP 55 proposal for Tcl (
> http://www.purl.org/tcl/tip/55.html) and the associated trial
> implementation of CANTCL
> (http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~cassidy/cgi-bin/cantcl).
> 
> It strikes me that it might be worthwhile consulting with each other
> to share experiences and perhaps even standardise metadata formats
> between our two sets of repositories.  With the close relationship
> between Python and Tcl (eg. Tkinter, Snack, typcl) there might even
> be an argument for a joint repository.
> 
> Any and all discussion welcomed, please maintain the cross post so
> that both sides of the fence can hear.
> 

As I've said before (on catalog-sig), I would consider a catalog as
proposed by PEP 301 as *just another way* to search for Python
software, but there are many ways already.

What I would like is that the catalog either

- allows to find out (programmatically) the link to the download URL
for the software package,

- or offers the software package itself.

The TIP 55 sample implementation seems to implement the second one.

Thomas