There was a period when the error was a stack trace. But that was pretty brief, and happened before PyPI moved more "officially" towards not supporting the search API.
I think part of the confusion here (which is reasonable IMO) is that pip has a huge version tail, and so people report error messages and behaviors that have been fixed for years. This is one of the challenges that I think gets under-appreciated about pip's maintenance.
I think part of the confusion here (which is reasonable IMO) is that pip has a huge version tail, and so people report error messages and behaviors that have been fixed for years. This is one of the challenges that I think gets under-appreciated about pip's maintenance.