[Catalog-sig] PyPI down again...

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I think it overlaps a bit the PEP goal, which is to set up a network of mirrors,
> and have them listed in the PyPI DNS  so clients can switch from one mirror
> to another.(and even do geoloc!)

JFTR, this already exists. a.mirrors.pypi.python.org and 
b.mirrors.pypi.python.org are already there and could be used by clients.

> Well maybe this is the best path to follow right now, as it will be done faster,
> without having to interact with much people to set it up, so it's a quick win.

My main worry (besides the client integration) is statistics: I do want 
to get download statistics. So anybody implementing it would have to 
find a way of fetching the download numbers from Amazon.

> But it will probably kill the mirroring protocol idea from the PEP in
> the process,
> which I think is superior in the long term since it provides a
> standardized ground
> for the community to set up mirrors independently from pypi.python.org.

I also remain skeptical that this cloud idea is useful at all. Amazon
Cloudfront is a *beta* service. So they aren't sure themselves whether 
it works correctly - and there have been reports about two-day outages 
of EC2, for bitbucket.org. There also have been complaints about the 
available bandwidth. So I'm not sure whether replacing a single point of 
failure with a different one is actually improving anything.

Regards,
Martin