PEP 301 -- Package Index and Metadata for Distutils

[Steve Cassidy]

On Fri, 08 Nov 2002 17:25:02 +0100, Thomas Heller wrote:
> 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.

TIP 55 defines a package format which includes metadata and one of the
metadata fields could well be the package download URL. This metadata
could be indexed separately by some service, but CANTCL is an attempt at 
getting something like CPAN started for Tcl so it assumes that it's 
storing the packages itself. 

As for programmatically finding download urls, my approach would be to set
up a canonical URL for Tcl packages using a purl (eg.
http://purl.org/tcl/cantcl/foobar would get you the foobar package via
cantcl). 

This aside, I see distinct advantages in having compatible metadata
between the two systems.

Steve