[Catalog-sig] PyPI down again...

[M.-A. Lemburg]

James Bennett wrote:
> 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.

Why don't you just start such a project, flesh out the details,
use the existing PyPI as reference for the APIs and then propose
that we use the new code for running PyPI ?

I think that if someone wants to do a rewrite it's best to just
let them decide about the choice of technology. Even if it doesn't
get used for PyPI in the end, it will still be a alternative
choice for local PyPI-style indexes for projects like Zope or
Plone to use, so work is not lost.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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