Can one query full name (or version) of selected packages at pypi?

[Caleb Hattingh]

Hi everyone

I suspect this has come up before, but google and group searches for
"python package index query" or "pypi query" and the like haven't
turned anything up.

I want to monitor the versions of the list of packages I like having
around, and I expect that the python package index might be a good
place to do this.   Typically, such packages would include, say, Pyrex
and PyParsing, for example.

So: I would like to query the package index with a short name (perhaps
wildcarded), and retrieve either the full name (from which to strip the
ver.) or version number, and compare it with what I have on disk.  At
this stage, just reporting the differences is fine.

I could do these steps myself with normal http access and
screen-scraping, but is there already such a system/script somewhere?
 Alternatively, how do you all keep versions of python addons
up-to-date?  Manually?

regards
Caleb