[Distutils] easy_install: link detection

[Ian Bicking]

easy_install doesn't work automatically with elementtree, because its 
download link leads to an interstitial HTML page.  So I thought I'd add 
the proper link to an index I'm keeping:
   http://effbot.org/downloads/elementtree-1.2.6-20050316.zip

But easy_install ignores it.  It looks fine to me?

Also, if I want to require a package that isn't locatable through PyPI, 
how should I deal with that?  I can add a find_links value to setup.cfg, 
then put the link there.  It'd be easier if I could put a URL to the 
package somewhere.  Or I guess if I could have a sort of local index. 
But if I put "./docs/packages.html" as a find_links value, easy_install 
can't find that.  So, what's the best way to deal with that?  I'm okay 
with the index page myself, but I think other people may not want to 
maintain such a thing.  (I'm thinking of writing a little app to create 
a index for broken PyPI entries, but that's another topic.)

And lastly on this topic, what should I do when it's likely a package 
will be installed without setuptools/easy_install?  For something like 
ElementTree there are lots of packages (RPM, deb, etc) that install the 
package; I can't really ask people to uninstall those and install the 
egg version.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  / http://blog.ianbicking.org