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

[David Cournapeau]

On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

> And I'm sorry, it is
> obvious that it will be fewer packages registered the more work it is
> to register packages and the more restrictions there are on
> registrations.

The question that matters is how significant this effect is, not that
it happens. Optimizing the number of packages independently of any
other criteria does not make much sense. I think many people within
the group of disatisfied Pypi users would be happy to have less
packages for a better overall experience.

Pypi claims to have ~ 10 000 packages; I quickly counted that
hackageDB has ~ 2000 packages, CRAN claims a similar number, and I
think haskell community is much smaller than python (R's certainly
is).

> And as the benefits you want with it can be easily
> reached in other ways, this is the wrong path to go down.

If it were, nobody would make the argument about making things more
consistent for Pypi. The goal is to make Pypi better, and easy
mirroring as well as reliable experience is part of that. CRAN for
example has tens if not hundred of mirrors, it works very well on all
supported platforms, for people who are not necessarily programmers,
and they undoubtly have much less resources than python. That's a much
more convincing data point that any handwaving about so called social
issues and what not, although you could argue that scientists are a
particular community (but that's the one I care in the first place
when I do python).

David