[Catalog-sig] PyPI down again...

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Is it possible it's time to designate a team?  I'm sure everyone
> appreciates the hard work of a lone volunteer, but having been one
> myself at times, the feeling that others may not do the job right is
> often eclipsed by their availability to try.

Help is certainly appreciated. The type of help depends on the 
volunteer, of course. E.g. I wouldn't want to give root accounts to
the first person that comes along and asks for them (except when the 
first person is Jannis Leidel, who (I believe) did the Apache restart
today).

> What's up with this years-old PEP for expanding the PyPI
> infrastructure?  Are there resources, relationships, volunteers
> lacking?
>
> What can we do to help? :)

If you are willing to invest *a lot* of time, then it seems that 
rewriting PyPI in Django would make a lot of people happy, because
they claim they can't contribute to the current code base because
they don't understand that. I don't want to do such a rewrite on
my own because I *do* understand the code base (despite not having 
written it in the first place, so I think that if you really want
to contribute, you can learn how it works); it also violates Joel
Spolsky's principle of never ever doing rewrites.

It will be a lot of work because it must implement full compatibility 
with the current code, which I can promise will keep you busy. Full
compatibility is primarily defined in terms of URLs that people may
have put on the web and into Google, and URLs and API that setuptools
back to very old releases may use.

That said, I have no idea what is causing the current outages. There 
must be some secret ping of death or something that somebody discovered.

For a smaller project, start putting mirror support into setuptools or 
distribute; this would make short (several hours) outages less severe 
for the class of users that want permanent availability for downloading.
It's unlikely that the mirrors would break when the master goes down;
they just stop mirroring.

Regards,
Martin