[Catalog-sig] How to get a list of package releases

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:07 PM 1/27/2007 +0100, =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Micha=B3_Kwiatkowski?= wrote:
>On 1/23/07, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > At 03:54 AM 1/23/2007 +0100, =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Micha=B3_Kwiatkowski?= wrote:
> > >  Or is sourceforge magic going to stay?
> > >I always thought sourceforge support was temporary, just to ease
> > >migration toward setuptools.
> >
> > The SourceForge magic is essentially gone as of 0.6c5; SourceForge fixed
> > their system so that neither screenscraping nor SF URL recognition is
> > required.
>
>Still sourceforge is treated in a special way.

Uh, no, it isn't.


>  Users of other systems
>have to manually put their links/files on PyPI.

So do users of SourceForge.


>Is this special
>support going to stay? And is it working, for example, with
>BerliOS-hosted projects?

If your "Home Page" or "Download URL" on PyPI is a page that contains 
direct download links, easy_install will recognize them.  This means that 
if your Download URL is a SF files page, the links will get recognized.  If 
BerliOS or whatever has similar pages, and somebody links the right page 
from their download URL, then it should also work.


> > >Well, maybe someone finds a bug in current release and want to try
> > >earlier version. If the current release is 0.8 how user will know what
> > >was the previous? Was it 0.7? 0.7.5? Maybe 0.8rc3?
> >
> > "easy_install 'thepackage<0.8'" will find it and install it.
>
>What if user doesn't have easy_install installed when he is looking
>for an answer? Maybe he knows where in the code the problem lies, so
>he want to check earlier versions' code without installing? Maybe he
>want to skim through changelog?

And how is that a requirement for an automated list of versions?  All of 
that is stuff that requires manual searching anyway; the data that 
easy_install gathers isn't going to help you there.


>PyPI should be usable on itself, it's a web interface after all.

Yep, and it works just fine.  See, it has a "home page" link where people 
can go to the project's actual home page to find things out about it.


>What links? Where are the links for all published releases of a given
>package? Did I miss something?

PyPI shows the packages the owner has chosen to show.  If the owner doesn't 
show old releases, that's his or her choice.


> > >"We don't need this because nobody asked for it" is a really bad excuse
> >
> > You seem to be under the impression that I said the feature isn't
> > needed.  In fact, I am *still* merely trying to find out what problem you
> > are trying to solve!
>
>Again: "PyPI can't show a list of package releases" (isn't this in a
>message subject?).

I still fail to see why this is a problem.  It's not PyPI's job to show 
releases a package owner has chosen to hide.

However, you could argue perhaps that the mere act of creating a new 
release shouldn't cause older releases to become hidden -- in other words, 
showing releases by default instead of hiding them.  You could also argue 
for changelog-like features, or other features.

What is still NOT clear -- because you still haven't explained it -- is why 
this information needs to be available to automated tools, as opposed to 
simply being available to humans through the web interface.  None of the 
use cases you've presented seem to call for an automated tool.