[Distutils] Python people want CPAN and how the latter came about

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 12:00 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
[..]
>
> There are a number of other mirroring tools, such as EggBasket and
> collective.eggproxy. For mirroring the whole index, pypimirror is
> probably the best starting point.

collective.eggproxy is particular though: it's a proxy-cache on PyPI
(on any other PyPI-like server), that can be used by developers to
collect in a local cache the archives they have downloaded at least
once, so they don't call PyPI anymore. The tree structure is
downloaded but is filled only
on requests.

IOW it gets filled when users uses it as their PyPI index. In tools
like buildout for instance, and
they end up with a local subset of the archive they *really* use and need.

We did that in my previous company because we didn't want to set up
and maintain a 7 giga mirror, while we just used probably less than 5%
of PyPI archives.

The caveat is that when a new version is up, it is downloaded only
when someone claims for it,
unlike mirrors that gets updated in crons. But it's not really a big
deal because my developers team back then was updating their buildouts
more often that any mirror cron out there I am pretty sure ;)

Tarek