On Jul 19, 2010, at 10:20 PM, exarkun@twistedmatrix.com wrote:

On 19 Jul, 01:28 pm, nickpholden@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,

The main mirror for the twisted download is down, this is causing
easy_install to hang for ages and fail when I try and install:

For Twisted 10.1, we took the extra step of loading the tarball to PyPI
to address this issue.  Apparently that was pointless, though?  Because
easy_install doesn't care about the downloads available on PyPI?  It'd
be good to know if this is the case, so we can consider whether or not
to waste the time for the next release.

As an experiment, I took the _additional_ step of updating the "download_url" field to point at the PyPI URL, <http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/T/Twisted/Twisted-10.1.0.tar.bz2>.

Before I did this, easy_install selected the download link from twistedmatrix.com.  Now, it reliably selects the PyPI URL first.

Looking at the history now, I can see that therve actually updated the download_url to something else already, but now I can't see what he set it to.  Maybe it was pointing at "twistedmatrix.com" and that's why it was screen-scraping?

I am not sure how to *remove* the download_url, though; it might be interesting to see what PyPI does in that case.

Can anyone with some more direct knowledge of how PyPI works comment on this?

(Cross-posting to the main Twisted list because this is of general interest.)