pypa/pip — Issue #395: "pip search" should use PackageFinder, not XML-RPC API
Author: carljm
Created: 2011-12-05 15:23:15+00:00
State: open

Using the XML-RPC API has several disadvantages:

* It lies. It tells you what releases are registered at PyPI, but if those releases have no sdists uploaded (or if there are linked sdists for newer releases than those actually registered at PyPI), it doesn't actually tell you what release will be installed by "pip install." If "search" used the same method for finding a package as "install", this would not be a problem.

* Related to the first; you can't incorporate --find-links or --extra-index-url, etc with a "pip search".

* PyPI mirrors do not support the XML-RPC API, so "pip search" is less robust than the other parts of pip by depending on it.