[Future] Investigate replacing pip internals

[uranusjr]

I feel like Distlib has a lot of pieces available to do most of what pip does. It might be a good idea to release a version with pip internals all replaced by Distlib, and work our way back to feature parity with pip. This would be better than the other way around because we can rely on user reports to know what is missing, instead of receiving complaints about things “no longer” works.

[techalchemy]

I'm curious about which things you have in mind here

[uranusjr]

The short answer is all of them :p Realistically though, I’m probably going to first look into replacing the finder; it is likely the most difficult part to reach feature parity (dependency links, find links, etc.), and the most magical part (we just use the finder directly). I’m very intrigued what can be extracted out of it, and maybe contribute to distlib or another library.

[techalchemy]

Dependency links go away next release of pip, I confirmed that.

The rest of it isn't actually that complicated, it's just parsing logic which is a pain in the ass. We might as well just do it in here though. You've already queried the simple api, and we query the json api as is. There isn't much reason to rely on pip for this at this point (I was hesitant to break away at first but feel more comfortable about it now)