[Catalog-sig] Rewrite PyPI for App Engine?

[Antoine Pitrou]

Noah Kantrowitz <noah <at> coderanger.net> writes:
> 
> GAE provides a professionally managed, "infinitely" scalable (or at least a
> heck of a lot more scalable
> than any other single server is likely to be, still not a substitute for
> mirrors), battle tested platform.

Infinite scalability is the new fashionable thing. But most websites can run on
a single server fine, and PyPI seems to be one of those.

As for "battle tested", the most popular frameworks are, as is SQLAlchemy, as is
Apache, as is PostgreSQL... I don't get what GAE buys in this area.

> There are already implementations of the GAE APIs that can be run
> independently, so I don't think it is
> quite as proprietary as you might think

Isn't it like chasing a moving target, though?
For an analogy, there are independent implementations of the Win32 APIs, but I'm
not sure anyone would trust Wine for running production services.

> Also, while Google is real
> company and has its own business to attend to, they have almost always been
> an ally and partner to the Python
> community and would likely be willing to work with us more
>  so than, say, Amazon Web Services (Rackspace is also a big Python proponent >
though, and has cloud offerings
> similar to AWS).

But the point in this discussion is not to try to pit the various service
providers one against another. It's to choose whether we want to rely on a
proprietary platform (modulo alternate implementations, see above), or on a
similarly battle-tested "standard" FLOSS-based stack.

And, assuming Google would like to provide servers and hosting, why wouldn't
they simply provide Linux servers on which to run Apache and anything else we
need to?

Regards

Antoine.