I think this makes sense as a pip sub command, and as part of the installation process (though I also agree with @bernatgabor that care must be taken to avoid paying steep performance penalties for it.
I also agree with @pradyunsg that I think the best path forward would be directly integrating it as part of pip’s code base, rather than a weird, embedded thing. Though if we want this to be available to more than just pip, maybe the right approach is a library for the “core” parts, then a pip command that uses that library [1]. As part of that I think using pip-api seems wrong as once it’s part of pip, it can just use pip’s internal APIs directly.
Adding to the repository API seems like a reasonable approach, devil is in the details for exactly how much information we want to put in there, but that’s a discussion for that PEP.
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I have not looked at the code at all to know if this makes sense or not. ↩︎