[Catalog-sig] Rewrite PyPI for App Engine?

[Michael Crute]

On Jun 18, 2010, at 7:27 PM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
>> Of course, this means writing code, etc., but I believe this is a reasonable
>> goal.  I think if "we" (Catalog-SIG?  PyPI maintainers?) committed to using
>> such an implementation (assuming it was of good quality) that we could find
>> people (probably not on this list) to write and maintain the code.  People
>> have already rewritten PyPI a couple times, but no one knows what exactly to
>> *do* with the rewrite so they haven't gone anywhere.  And PyPI is not a
>> particularly complicated application.  I think we can set the bar high on
>> the implementation quality and that people will meet it, so long as they
>> know their effort won't be in vain.
> 
> Out of curiosity : have you ever worked with the current implementation ?
> 
> I have hard time to understand why some people say it's hard to work with it,
> I don't think its a valid argument.

I briefly played with the current implementation and found it somewhat difficult to work with. Part of the problem is that the code is dated and not well tested. The other part of the problem is that there are too many dependencies and replicating the environment required to run the official code is somewhat painful. For my uses I really don't want to run postgres just to serve a version of the cheeseshop. A project like chishop eliminates many of these problems as it's main dependency is Django which is designed to make setting up the application simple and allows you to chose what kind of database you want from something very simple like sqlite all the way up to something more robust like postgres.