[Catalog-sig] What is the point of pythonpackages.com?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> That a package that only exists in a version control system can be
> listed on PyPI makes sense to me. That a package without any source
> code is listed on PyPI makes less sense to me; are there examples
> where that does or did make sense?

I think there are still a number of packages listed on PyPI that
are not free software, so the only way to "download" them is to pay
for a license (and you may then get a CD-ROM instead of a download).

I consider that a reasonable use case (despite encouraging software
developers to develop all their software as free software).

> But if at some point there *was* a release of the package listed in
> PyPI and now, without author intent involved (to leave out the moral
> arguments) the release cannot be found anymore, I'd say PyPI is
> incorrect.

Very true. However, PyPI is always incorrect in many respects: the
package descriptions may be incorrect or incomplete, the classifiers
may be incorrect, and author information may become out of date after
some time.

By design, getting correct information into the index is the task
of the package authors, not of the PyPI infrastructure. The only
exception are cases where the information is maliciously misleading,
and then the information is deleted, not corrected.

Regards,
Martin