P.J. Eby wrote:
the shortcomings of a package manager
Well, technically, this'd be a feature. Granted, it's only a feature
for users of projects whose maintainers are *not* keeping a
well-groomed PyPI page. ;-)
easy_install has significant market penetration. If you make
easy_install believe the meta-data, then you give the project
maintainers some incentive to get their meta-data right. That seems
more desirable than the current scenario, where a well-behaved project
is inconvenienced.
I understand that easy_install has to do a balancing act between
enabling bad behaviour by the project maintainers (i.e. it has to work
with poorly maintained projects for the benefit of the users) and
encouraging good behaviour by the project maintainers (again for the
benefit of the users). I just think it is acceptable to give the
projects a little incentive to get it right.
Unfortunately, even if I fixed that today, it wouldn't have ANY effect
on 99% of the field installations of any Python package management
tools: there are still people using 4 or 5 year old versions of
easy_install, and a lot of people use Distribute (via their OS
install), which is a year behind the setuptools trunk on various
things. Most other Python package management solutions are based on
top of easy_install in one way or another, as well.
If you fix it now, the fixed version might well displace the earlier
versions in another 4 or 5 years. If not, you might be having this same
discussion again in 4 or 5 years.
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