[Pythonmac-SIG] PackageManager philosophy

[Kevin Altis]

> From: Jack Jansen
>
> One problem that we would still need to solve on the user side (there's
> lots of issues to solve on the scapegoat side) is that of finding
> packages, especially in the potentially large experimental database.
> The logical thing to do would be to use the PyPI model, but as of this
> writing it just doesn't cut it. I just tried find a gui package for
> MacOSX (pretending I didn't know any names). Whatever I typed in I
> couldn't find anything. I eventually located pyobjc by typing "cocoa"
> into the *description* field, but that's it.

This is likely a combination of issues. One is that PyPI has a variety of
different descriptors, some of which overlap, and only one field, the
Classifiers is actually structured data, and only two fields: name and
version are actually required for a PyPI entry.

The search page let's you enter Summary, Description, and Keywords, though
those should probably be reserved for an Advanced Search. The advanced
search could also present a list of all the Classifiers or somehow present a
more detailed specification from the trove categories.

  http://www.python.org/pypi?:action=search_form

So, there should be simple one field search that does a case-insensitive
search of all the fields to get the most hits. I would probably put that
search on the main PyPI page and have both simple and advanced searches on
the Search page.

Even if PyPI doesn't follow the simpler model, the Package Manager can do
its own simple search.

The other side of the coin is whether the fields that make up the PyPI info
need to be expanded or get more structure for things like the keywords. The
trove categories are quite limited.

ka