[Catalog-sig] [Distutils] Specification for package indexes?

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Fri, 07 Jul 2006 01:03:33 +1000, richardjones at optusnet.com.au wrote:
>> Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>> Why not?  ;)
>
>That was actually what I was afraid the reasoning was ;)
>
>I guess I just go all wobbly in the knees at the thought of having to maintain a "screen scraping" interface.
>
>Funnily enough, Johannes Gisjbers, Andrew Dalke and I were talking about this very issue last night. I proposed that we detect the user-agent of the setuptools client, and in response send back really minimalist HTML (no surrounding page template). Probably overkill, but this may have been after we'd had beer :)

Making this explicit actually makes it a good idea.

  http://host/pypiurl?format=simple

It doesn't even have to be html at this point, either.  Return a nicely
structured xml or csv or whatever document.  And then you can completely
omit setuptools hints from the actual markup, since setuptools won't
ever care about that.

Jean-Paul