[Catalog-sig] PyPI enhancement doc

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, 25 May 2005 04:36 pm, Ian Bicking wrote:
> The sdist type does not indicate what kind of archive is used -- most
> notable, both zip and tar are possible.  (Does sdist create zip files
> on its own?)

As it turns out, this is the case. I didn't realise it until someone got all 
hot under the collar about the unix-centric PyPI... no, I'm getting 
sidetracked here. Anyway, yes, on Windows sdists are ZIP files. You can force 
sdist to produce a particular format with the --format switch.


> However, I think the client can determine the proper way 
> to unpack the file after downloading; this aspect of files is
> self-describing.

The correct meta-type should be supplied to the client too (by Apache, the 
file server).


> An svn trunk is not a package file.  However, it is largely equivalent
> to an sdist file, though it must be downloaded in a different way;
> actually performing the download is a client concern, so it doesn't
> really effect this.

Are you advocating that release_files somehow point to SVN repos? That doesn't 
sound right, so I'll presume I've misunderstood you :)


> I'm a little soft on these, since I don't know if specifiers and the
> necessary metadata is really ready:
>
> providing_packages(specifier):
>      A list of (name, version) from release_provides.  E.g.,
>      providing_packages('PageTemplate>=1.0') == [('zpt', '1.0')].  This
>      will only return non-hidden packages.
>
> requiring_packages(specifier):
>      A list of (name, version) from release_requires.

There's no code to actually perform this function, but the meta-data 
capability is there. We probably won't see much in the way of this stuff 
until Python2.5 becomes widespread in use (since additions to the meta-data 
require releases of Python).


> Search should be available with a single field, that searches all of
> package name, summary, description/description_html, keywords.  This
> should be on the front page.

A laudable goal. TSearch2 might be able to do this --- I don't know enough 
about it. I've recently added Xapian support to Roundup --- and it's really, 
really easy to use.


    Richard
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.python.org/pipermail/catalog-sig/attachments/20050526/885e79cc/attachment.pgp