[Distutils] does pypi or red-dove have a better firehose API than "download all the packages"?

[Daniel Holth]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
> On May 24, 2013, at 12:14 PM, "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>
> On 24.05.2013 17:21, Vinay Sajip wrote:
>
> Donald Stufft <donald <at> stufft.io> writes:
>
> Most packages also have an egg-info inside of them you can parse.
>
>
> I don't know how accurate that information is - IIRC pip always runs
> egg-info on downloaded archives. I presume this is to get the correct
> dependencies which are relevant to the installation system.
>
>
> It would be nice to have the PKG-INFO readily available on the /simple/
> index pages.
>
> This contains the Requires header as well.
>
>
> The requires headers in the PKG-INFO are practically worthless.

Although PKG-INFO specifies a Requires: header and later a
Requires-Dist: header, almost no packages use it. The useful
requirements information is currently in *.egg-info/requires.txt and
requires.txt can't be represented accurately as Requires: headers. The
new Metadata 2.0 specification will remedy that by representing
everything in a blob of JSON.