[Catalog-sig] [Proposal] Registered packages must provide the source code distribution on PyPI

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Didn't Setuptools/easy_install began this policy of following the
> download_url from PyPI's early days when it wasn't even possible to
> upload to PyPI (or at least during the transition when a majority of
> packages only provided download_urls).

Not sure whether this was rhetoric: yes, that's how it all started.

PyPI/the cheeseshop was originally *just* a package index, and designed 
as such. Automated downloads wheren't even considered, but the objective 
was to give people a way of registering and finding Python software 
(because the manually-maintained lists of Python software started to rot).

I added file upload at some point, primarily because people asked for it 
who didn't have any web hosting elsewhere. It was assumed that most 
packages would release somewhere to the net, and only few packages would 
use the file upload.

FWIW, the documentation upload started with the very same assumption, 
and it's probably still the case that people host documentation at PyPI 
only if they have nothing better.

Regards,
Martin