[Python-Dev] PEP 365 (Adding the pkg_resources module)

Thu Mar 20 16:31:20 CET 2008

At 09:44 AM 3/20/2008 -0400, Tres Seaver wrote:
>I don't know how to make this requirement compatible with using shared
>dependencies, except to make it easier for folks to download *all* the
>requirements, and later install from the local "distribution cache" (a
>directory full of .zip / .egg / .tgs files). It does turn out to be
>quite easy to build a PyPI-style "simple" index for such a cache. Your
>use case would then require:
>> 1. Run some command to fetch the desired package and the transitive
> closure of its dependencies into a working directory (the cache).
>> 2. Run another command to build an index for that directory.
>> 3. Run 'easy_install', pointing to the local index.

Actually, if someone were to develop a patch for PyPI to do this, we 
could perhaps have a "display download dependencies" link for eggs 
shown on PyPI. That way, someone who wants to do a manual download 
could get a page with links for all the required eggs, and manually 
download them.
(Of course, the other alternative would be for someone to provide an 
IE-controlling extension to urllib2 so that easy_install wouldn't be 
proxy-bound on such machines.) 