[Catalog-sig] Fwd: [ pypi-Bugs-3488989 ] Need a way to list all package versions

[Richard Jones]

On 28 February 2012 22:07, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 12:07 AM, Donald Stufft <donald.stufft at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Saturday, February 18, 2012 at 4:01 PM, anatoly techtonik wrote:
>> 1. does anybody else also thinks that having a way to list all package
>> versions available on PyPI would be awesome?
>>
>> It's possible via the API to list all packages regardless of hidden or not.
>> The Web UI doesn't support it. I'm assuming from the ticket PyPI is happy
>> with the way it works, but fwiw you can see all the package versions for
>> Sphinx at http://crate.io/packages/Sphinx/  (click the All Versions tab).
>
> Thanks for replies about API, I used XML-RPC myself, but it's not a
> good user experience to require Python shell to get information from
> the web site. http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/S/Sphinx/ really
> helps to see what packages are available using browser alone, but
> unfortunately it is a hidden magic.

When PyPI was created there was a design discussion and decision made
that the site implement the most common case which is that package
authors expose only one version, the most recent one. Unsupported
versions are deliberately difficult to find. That's the point. The
intention is to reduce the authors' maintenance burden by discouraging
people from using older versions of their software.

Your example project, Sphinx, advertises precisely one current
version, 1.1.2. This is the one on their website and it's the one on
PyPI.

Some packages expose more versions because they have multiple release
branches and that's their choice. More versions are findable on the
site for those packages.

And, as has been pointed out, for data mining applications you can get
access to the full data.


     Richard