[Catalog-sig] PyPI down again...

[James Bennett]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 5:27 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>> What is it now, just a straight WSGI app?
>
> No, FCGI.

Statements like this lead me to believe that ignoring Joel Spolsky
would be the right thing to do.

Right now the PyPI codebase seems to have a bus number[1] of one:
Martin, who is apparently the only person who really understands the
code well enough to do significant work on it. This is something which
could be remedied by having more people learn the code and get
familiar enough with it to make contributions, but that's complicated
by the fact that PyPI still does so much basically from scratch -- it
doesn't even use the standard gateway interface Python web developers
are expected to be familiar with, much less any well-known libraries.

As such, just having people learn the code doesn't seem like a great
option; for one thing, existing knowledge of Python web development
isn't transferrable to PyPI, and working on PyPI isn't transferrable
to anything else a Python web developer would be doing, and so it's
unlikely that many, if any, people would be sufficiently motivated.
Which points to rewriting as the best option, resulting in greater
innate maintainability and a larger community of potential
contributors.

As to *what* it should be rewritten with, I frankly don't care so long
as it's something reasonably well-known and well-understood within the
broader Python web community, and speaks WSGI (which is essentially
the same thing, but it needs to be said). That gives all sorts of
options, from a lightweight stack on something like Werkzeug all the
way up to a full framework solution with something like Pylons. To
avoid the perennial holy wars that choice seems to engender, though,
I'd suggest just asking Martin to pick something he feels he'd be
comfortable with, and having everyone else who wants to help shut up
and go with his choice.


-- 
"Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct."