[Catalog-sig] A 90% Solution

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 12.03.2013 00:39, Donald Stufft wrote:
> 
> On Mar 11, 2013, at 7:04 PM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> 
>> Just a thought, but...
>>
>> If 90% of PyPI projects do not have any external files to download,
>> then, wouldn't it make sense to:
> 
> To be accurate it's 90% don't have any files/release available *only* externally. Most have external  files to download because it's very rare that a project doesn't include an home_page or a download_url, especially since distutils complains if you don't.

How are you going to verify that disabling the links
on those projects won't make certain release versions of
those packages unavailable for pip/easy_install ?

How are you planing to inform the package authors of that
change, so that they can take corrective action ?

Which options would be available for authors ?

PyPI is a much too important Python resource to play around with.
We need a good understanding of the effects a change may have
and provide ways to deal with them, before putting a change,
which potentially breaks hundreds of packages, into
production.

So yeah, just a thought ;-)

>> 1. Add a project-level option to enable or disable the adding of the
>> rel="" attribute to /simple links (but not affecting the links in any
>> other way)
>> 2. Default it to disabled for new projects, and
>> 3. Set it to disabled *now* for the 90% of projects that *don't have
>> external files*?
> 
> +1 except 1. should be to remove the links entirely from the /simple/
> index, not to just remove the rel attribute.

Removing those links removes the possibility of tools
to still download or display information based on those
links, e.g. to build a semantic web of Python resources.

Please remember that the /simple/ index is part
of the PyPI API, so it needs to be handled with the same
care as the rest of the PyPI APIs.

If you want to experiment with new ways of building the
index, I'd suggest to first experiment with a new index, say
/simple-v2/, before touching the main /simple/ index.

Regarding the links, it's probably better to not
remove the rel="" attributes but instead change them
from rel="download" to e.g. rel="external-download";
or to keep the old index semantics around as /simple-v1/.
This keeps the valuable semantic relation available for
tools that want to use it.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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