[Catalog-sig] PyPI down again...

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 11:18 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> There are several ways to run PyPI, including WSGI, FCGI, CGI, and a
> stand-alone server. The mode which is used on PyPI just happens to be FCGI.
>
> I'm not sure how the integration with Apache matters - the actual code
> generating web pages is the same all the time, no matter what gateway
> interface is being used.
>
> As for the bus number: Richard Jones is also familiar with the code, as he
> wrote it in the first place. He just didn't contribute much lately.
> I believe Tarek is also knowledgable. So the bus factor is rather 3.

I am pretty confident now with the code, and I don't think it's very complex.
It just grew big in some parts, like webui.py which needs to be splited.

Frankly, I think it just needs a bit of cleanup, maybe a migration to SQLAchemy
but that's it.  As a matter of fact; some folks in the Montreal Python
user group are working on
refactoring it right now, because they wanted to provide some new features.

So I would be 0- on writing it from scratch.

I'd suggest to move it to a DVCS (hg.python.org?) to make the contributions
easier.

Regards
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org