I have almost finished the work in the pypi branch for PloneSoftwareCenter PyPI support. There are a few things to polish but it works. (90% of the work was already done by Sidnei, so I have done mostly minor refactorings). I guess I'll polish it until Alex Clark merge it into the trunk.

If you want to give it a try, you can use the buildout I have added in the collective here:

[http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/PloneSoftwareCenter/buildout/branches/pypi/

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I also have a running prototype here:

http://products.ingeniweb.com/catalog

were we are trying it. This will be our public PSC instance and will soon contain all our packages and some public packages mirrored or repackaged as eggs.

Current features

The features are:
- support of distutils and setuptools register and upload commands - automatic creation of projects and releases - support of PyPI's simple page, so it can be used by easy_install and zc.buildout

If you want to try it up ask me for a user account.

Trove classification

The current default categories uses PyPI to classify the packages, and everything is hooked to the register command. So when you upload a package, it will appear in the proper categories in the software center.

That said, you can change the categories to manage your own. When a package is uploaded, it will just ignore the unknown categories. I am working on PyPI side so the Cheeseshop itself works the same way.
(hopefully, it will be accepted, because the guys from the catalog team are helping me out in polishing my proposal)

see my document at : http://wiki.python.org/moin/EnhancedPyPI (see Making PyPI permissive for Trove classification)

Dealing with several PyPI-like servers

Last but not least, as a Plone developer, the final goal is to be able to register and upload packages to both PSC and PyPI. This is a bit tricky with the current distutils implementation and I am working on this so it can deal with several servers.

The final form will be to be able to do:
$ python setup.py register sdist upload -r http://example.com/repository # registering and uploading at example.com

$ python setup.py register sdist upload        # registering and uploading at PyPI

There are some default policies in PSC though, to avoid people uploading projects and file to easily: if the user is a simple member, a register command call will create a project and submit it, and the upload command won't work until the project has been accepted and published.

Next steps

I am really excited about having the same standard everywhere, and to be able to deploy our packages in the community through a simple command line:
- at the cheeseshop - in our private software center - in our public software center - hopefully, in plone.org when it goes Plone 3.x

The next steps will be:
- to get some feedback from the Plone community, and build a TODO list with it (I have to collect Wichert remarks from the ML to start to build it) - to polish the code - to add XML-RPC APIs, like PyPI has

[http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/PloneSoftwareCenter/buildout/branches/pypi/

]: http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/PloneSoftwareCenter/buildout/branches/pypi/