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

[Lennart Regebro]

On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 08:22, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there any hard data to back up the idea that making some things
> mandatory when registering/uploading to Pypi is detrimental to Pypi's
> goal, or is it just opinion ?

It's just how humans work. Hard data comes from 200 years of economic
and social sciences.

> It is very difficult for me to understand the rationale for this. This
> is specific to Pypi AFAIK

Not at all.

> (compared to CRAN, hackage, etc...), and the
> advantages of making it mandatory are obvious and hard facts (easy to
> mirror

It does not make it more easy to mirror. When you mirror PyPI's file
storage, you obviously do not mirror what is not there.

> easy to do basic consistency checks, easy to interoperate),

I don't see how that helps either.

> whereas the downsides are far from obvious.

The downside is *extremely* obvious: You make it harder to register
packages on PyPI. That means less packages will be registered. As it
stands today, the requirement that you would have to upload the
packages to PyPI as well as register them means, for example, that
neither Twisted nor PIL would not be listed on PyPI. Two very popular
and well respected packages.

That *is* an obvious downside.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
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