[Catalog-sig] FYI: UI change also broke EasyInstall MD5 checks :(

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:19 AM 7/21/2006 +1000, Richard Jones wrote:
>On Thursday 20 July 2006 14:35, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> > At 01:45 PM 7/20/2006 +1000, richardjones at optusnet.com.au wrote:
> > > > Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > > > EasyInstall expects a PyPI-listed package's MD5 to be found in
> > > > parentheses, not square brackets.
> > >
> > >Crap, sorry, I thought I'd caught all the changes, but I missed this one.
> > >I'll fix it ASAP.
> >
> > FYI, the fix doesn't work either, as there's still a title="" attribute in
> > there.  Please see the regex in the API doc.
>
>OK, I've removed the title attrs.
>
>Are we convinced that screen-scraping is bad yet?

I never argued that this particular bit was *good*.  As I said, it was 
always a stopgap measure until PyPI supported a better way to retrieve the 
MD5's, preferably as part of the URLs.  I don't recall that you've never 
proposed any alternative, and I seem to recall that not even the XML-RPC 
API offers this information.

Please note that I proposed the use of #md5 links well before I implemented 
the screen scraping, and asked for feedback.  Your only feedback was to 
inquire what happened in browsers, to which I replied -- and that was the 
end of the thread.  What else was I supposed to do, beat you about the head 
and shoulders?  At the time, you said you were busy.

However, since you now seem to have some time, maybe it would be a good 
time to implement some of the things I suggested you implement a year ago 
so that screen scraping wouldn't be necessary.  ;)