[Distutils] Specification for package indexes?

[Jim Fulton]

On Jun 23, 2006, at 4:30 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> At 04:10 PM 6/23/2006 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
>
>> What form must an index take to be usable with setuptools?
>>
>> Is there anything documented how such a beast should be organized?
>> What should it's pages should look like?  Is there any special
>> pattern setuptools (easy_install?) looks for to find pages with
>> download links?
>> Or does it search any link given?
>>
>> Also, I've noticed that if you gibe a location with find-links  
>> that has
>> links to distributions for the thing you're looking for, it you can
>> specify
>> pretty much anything as an index.
>
> That's correct.  If all your packages can just be linked from a  
> single page, that's more than enough to satisfy.
>
> However, if you want to give easy_install an alternate --index-url  
> to use in place of PyPI, it must meet the four simple requirements  
> described here:
>
>     http://mail.python.org/pipermail/catalog-sig/2005-June/000654.html
>
> These are the only conditions that easy_install has for the  
> organization of an "index" in the PyPI sense.  Note that they can  
> all be accomodated via static HTML pages.

That's a lot of screen scraping. :)

It would be good to capture this as part of the documentation IMO

> I'm considering adding XML-RPC support to easy_install in 0.7,  
> though.  PyPI now has a nice XML-RPC API that is more responsive  
> than the web UI, and it supports case-insensitive partial match  
> searches, making it suitable for easy_install to query when a typed- 
> in name doesn't exactly match the spelling of a PyPI entry.

I think that would be much better.

I think it would also be helpful to have an option (-I) to
disable index search.  There will be cases where people
don't want to put distributions in PyPI and won't want to have
to implement an index server.  The find-links mechanism seems to
work fine most of the time.

Jim

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