[portland] Ghosts in the machine

[Adam Lowry]

On Aug 4, 2013, at 10:26 AM, Robin Dunn <robin at alldunn.com> wrote:
> Take a closer look at the PyPI pages.  There are no download links, so pip doesn't know where to fetch the sources from.

There was a recent update to PyPI to change how download links are presented by default. PyPI used to present the homepage and download url for easy_install and pip to scrape, looking for potential downloads. That could take forever, even if the project also presented the files or links directly on the index itself. Each package maintainer got an email telling them to either explicitly select this legacy behavior or to present specific links. Here are the links that were sent around, if you're interested:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0438/
http://pypi-externals.caremad.io/help/what/

What this likely means is that those packages that weren't installable didn't update their packages, which is a sign they might be unmaintained. If you're looking more closely at them I'd hit the source directly.

Adam