[Distutils] providing a way for pip to communicate extra info to users

[Dwight Hubbard]

It would be useful as well for sites that run their own mirror
infrastructure to be able to add motd text to the pip commands as well.

However I don't think this should be implemented via the response code from
a call to some rest api.  It would be trivial to proxy the call to a
different location and send a different message.  Any implementation would
need some way to sign and verify the message as authentic.

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 10:18 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11 April 2018 at 17:32, Pradyun Gedam <pradyunsg at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 10 Apr 2018, 05:17 Chris Jerdonek, <chris.jerdonek at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> [...]
> >> A possible middle-ground could be to hard-code a message in pip. Pip
> >> could display the message in certain circumstances, e.g. in response
> >> to certain types of failures. For example, the message could tell
> >> users to check a certain URL maintained by PyPA for further
> >> information / possible announcements.
> >>
> >> What do people think?
> >
> >
> > I like the idea.
> >
> > I think linking to a location where we can make informative comments
> would
> > be a good idea — ideally where we can show announcements reverse
> > chronologically.
> >
> > I don’t know how relevant they are but scenarios where this would help,
> that
> > come to my mind are:
> >
> > - Status Page: "pypi.org is undergoing an incident and installations may
> > fail. You can find more information at status.python.org."
>
> For HTTP type responses, which is what I understood Chris' question to
> be about, this seems like a good approach to me - the index can supply
> a response that triggers pip to report a message. "The index XXX
> reported an issue - for more information see XXX/status". That would
> need a PEP 503 change to say that an index can trigger this message by
> sending a certain response code, and that if an index does send that
> code, it must provide additional information at its /status page.
>
> > - Major Features: for things like PEP 517 when it's released. "There's
> news.
> > Have a look at pypi.org/news" or something like that.
>
> For these, I was thinking about this in the context of how we announce
> releases like pip 10. Maybe something like this would better fit as an
> addition to the pip selfcheck code - so that as well as checking for a
> newer version, pip would also check for a "Message of the day" at a
> known URL and display it if there is one. That gives us a way to
> announce releases or betas, or upcoming deprecations, in a way that
> reaches every pip user (at least every one who's connected to the
> internet!) It's a bit intrusive, so I think it's critical that we use
> it sparingly, but it would be good to have at least some channel that
> reaches everyone. I don't think it's something we'd want to use for
> transient issues like pypi outages, for instance.
>
> Paul
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Dwight Hubbard
Python Language Guy
M: 408-646-9444
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