[Catalog-sig] [Proposal] Registered packages must provide the source code distribution on PyPI

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Andreas Jung wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
> 
>> Note however that Andreas' proposal was to require that 'sdists' be
>> uploaded.  I personally won't use binary-only packages, but it has
>> historically been true that PyPI was intended to support them, as well
>> as to support registration of packages hosted offsite.  Andreas'
>> proposal doesn't address either of those cases.
> 
> A more precise requirement would be:
> 
>  - upload the sdist if your package is open-source
>  - upload the official distribution package if you are package
>    is commercial
> 
> Basically...upload everything that you would also keep on your own
> server as official distribution.

We cannot force authors to do this. There may be other reasons
why they can't upload such things to PyPI, e.g. crypto, trademark
and copyright laws, or even corporate rules if the author is
maintaining the package as part of his or her job.

What we can do, is make it more attractive to upload distribution
files to PyPI and also to make the whole "find the right file
to download and install" story easy enough for automatic tools
to not just give up.

For that to work, we'd need to rethink the infrastructure a bit
more, though:

If more package authors start shipping egg files for
the various Unix platforms as both UCS2 and UCS4 and for 3 or
4 different Python versions and keep those files around for
several releases, we'll run into problems with having
to mirror all those download files.

We've been doing this for several years now and it's probably an
extreme example, but just as reference: we have almost 6GB of
Python archives up on our servers and that's just for ~10
packages.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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