[Python-Dev] The "autoinstall" package just uploaded to PyPI

[Phillip J. Eby]

I just wanted to throw in a quick note that this package:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/autoinstall

which was just uploaded by Daniel Krech, is a lot closer in spirit to 
what I was trying to accomplish with PEP 365 than Guido's bootstrap 
proposal.  Perhaps there's room for both in the stdlib?  (And note 
that even though the examples use eggs, it does not do anything 
egg-specific; any zipfile importable by Python works with autoinstall.)

There are a number of changes I would suggest making to autoinstall, 
like making it possible to access information about files in the 
cache, supporting non-toplevel modules, programmatic and 
environment-level control of the cache directory, that sort of 
thing.  Heck, it'd be nice (although not essential) for it to support 
finding the right URL from PyPI.

I also suspect that users might want to have some way to disable it 
or restrict it to certain hosts, etc., perhaps through a 
configuration file.  It should probably also default the cache to a 
temporary directory, in the absence of other input.

(Experience with pkg_resources' caching approach suggests that using 
the current directory or a home-directory-based location by default 
was a bad idea, at least without a fallback to a tempdir on write failure.)

Any thoughts?