[Distutils] Specification for package indexes?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:10 PM 6/23/2006 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:

>What form must an index take to be usable with setuptools?
>
>Is there anything documented how such a beast should be organized?
>What should it's pages should look like?  Is there any special
>pattern setuptools (easy_install?) looks for to find pages with
>download links?
>Or does it search any link given?
>
>Also, I've noticed that if you gibe a location with find-links that has
>links to distributions for the thing you're looking for, it you can
>specify
>pretty much anything as an index.

That's correct.  If all your packages can just be linked from a single 
page, that's more than enough to satisfy.

However, if you want to give easy_install an alternate --index-url to use 
in place of PyPI, it must meet the four simple requirements described here:

     http://mail.python.org/pipermail/catalog-sig/2005-June/000654.html

These are the only conditions that easy_install has for the organization of 
an "index" in the PyPI sense.  Note that they can all be accomodated via 
static HTML pages.

I'm considering adding XML-RPC support to easy_install in 0.7, 
though.  PyPI now has a nice XML-RPC API that is more responsive than the 
web UI, and it supports case-insensitive partial match searches, making it 
suitable for easy_install to query when a typed-in name doesn't exactly 
match the spelling of a PyPI entry.