How to download or install Gitlib as a standalone library with recent versions of pip?

Question

This is a very simple problem, but I'm completely stuck on how to solve it. I couldn't even found a way for just downloading.
The website don't give anything for downloading it outside pypi and without smug.

$ pip install --allow-external gitlib gitlib
Collecting gitlib
  Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement gitlib (from versions: )
  Some insecure and unverifiable files were ignored (use --allow-unverified gitlib to allow).
No matching distribution found for gitlib

Using the required options doesn't solve the problem.

$ pip install --allow-all-external --allow-unverified gitlib gitlib==0.5
Collecting gitlib==0.5
  Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement gitlib==0.5 (from versions: )
No matching distribution found for gitlib==0.5

Answer 1

Pypi is only a list of registered projects -- if the package is listed at a download URL, you will need to follow that path to get the actual code to install.

In your case, you could git clone or pip install from git://mcnabbs.org/smug.git. If there's issues cloning or downloading, that's not something anyone here would be able to help you out with -- the package maintainer has decided to self-host his code.

More generally, pip interacts with pypi. Pypi is a package index for code that is not in the standard library. Much of this code is third-party/non-official. It's important to note that there is no promise of quality, functionality, or ability to install this code directly from pip.

In the case of "Gitlab" as per pypi , there's no promise that the code is actually true to its marketing of being a "Pythonic low-level Git library", there's no guarantee that the download URL is direct (or correct or even working), and it's a perfect example of the value of knowing that this information is maintained by the person that registered that package on pypi.