[Catalog-sig] Deprecate External Links

[Daniel Holth]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 7:43 AM, Reinout van Rees <reinout at vanrees.org> wrote:
> On 27-02-13 16:26, Donald Stufft wrote:
>>
>>    2. External links decrease the expected uptime for a particular set
>>        of requirements. PyPI itself has become very stable, however
>>        the same cannot be said for all of the hosts linked that the
>> toolchain
>>        processes. Each new host is an additional SPOF.
>
>
> A very good practical illustration: my colleague cannot "pip install
> mercurial" right now as the mercurial.selenic.com website is down for hours
> now.
>
> All the download links on http://pypi.python.org/simple/Mercurial/
> point at things like
> http://mercurial.selenic.com/release/mercurial-1.5.tar.gz
>
> I'm very happy to have a local buildout egg cache, otherwise the mercurial
> website's failure would bring a couple of my buildouts to a grinding halt.
>
>
> A couple of those project that don't bother to put their packages on pypi
> can bring your pip or buildout *down* quite often.
>
>
>
> Reinout

I've been promoting a similar workflow with "pip wheel" (a proposed
command present in the wheel fork of pip):

pip wheel -w /wheel/directory dependency

pip install --no-index --find-links /wheel/directory dependency

You wind up with cached builds for every package you are using and its
dependencies and only consult the index when you are willing to be
surprised.