[Catalog-sig] Proposal to Reverse Ordering of Scraped Links in PyPI

[P.J. Eby]

At 06:49 PM 7/27/2010 +0200, Alexis Metaireau wrote:
>On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 12:12 -0400, P.J. Eby wrote:
> > At 12:21 PM 7/27/2010 +0200, Konrad Delong wrote:
> > > >> This *already* causes problems for pypi maintenance.
> > > >
> > > > For some time now, easy_install uses the '/simple' index (specifically
> > > > intended for automated tools' consumption), rather than the 
> human-oriented
> > > > pages.  Among other benefits, the /simple index can be served 
> or mirrored
> > > > statically, rather than being generated anew on each hit.
> > >
> > >To my understanding, simple index version encoding cannot be reliable
> > >(see [1], about this time: 2010-07-21T10:07:02 ).
> > >
> > >However, json interface sounds like a good trade-off here.
> > >
> > >Konrad
> > >
> > >
> > >[1] http://weblion.psu.edu/chatlogs/%23distutils/2010/07/21.txt
>
>Konrad, what i was saying last time was about the way Michael Foord have
>added -py* at the end of his archives, to try making them only retrieved
>for python versions == py-*, IIRC.

Ah.  easy_install doesn't support that either, it just doesn't result 
in an error, because it assumes that 
<http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/u/unittest2/unittest2-0.5.0-py2.3.tar.gz#md5=c4722438ea5f3f327082c29e9d5ad25a>unittest2-0.5.0-py2.3.tar.gz 
is either

1) the '0.5.0-py2.3' version of unittest2, or
2) the 'py2.3' version of 'unittest2-0.5.0'

And then selects one based on whether you're looking for a project 
named 'unittest2' or 'unittest2-0.5.0'.

Distutils2, OTOH, is failing because it can't process '0.5.0-py2.3' 
as a version number without more heuristics in its "rational 
suggestion" algorithm.