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

[Lennart Regebro]

On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 11:13, Eric Smith <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> When some people say "I want to mirror PyPI", I think they mean "I want to
> have a private copy of all of the files I need to install a given set of
> packages I need". This is often a requirement because the computer(s) where
> an installation is occurring are behind firewalls without general Internet
> access or are production servers where administrative rules require that all
> installation repositories be locked down.

Right, setting up your *own package index* is not *mirroring*. You do
not need to mirror all of PyPI, and you do not need to mirror the PyPI
metadata do do this. And the argument of file uploads has been used
for mirroring as well, namely for third-party services. And that
argument still does not hold water.

Setting up package indexes has benefits and there are as mentioned
several different ways, one being a mirrored package index, ie caching
the other setting up special indexes for different versions of the
software etc. Yes, it's correct, if people would just add download
URLs or upload the packages on PyPI, downloading all the files to make
your own package index would be somewhat easier.

Is this really a major difference to CPAN? If people don't upload a
package to CPAN, what do you do? Does this get magically resolved
somehow? I don't see how that would work.

* If you only use packages on PyPI, it's easy.
* If you only use packages on CPAN, it's easy.
* If you use packages not on PyPI, it's more complicated.
* If you use packages not on CPAN, it's more complicated.

Seems to be the same to me.

And it ends with the same conclusion: We must figure WHY people don't
upload to PyPI and FIX THEIR PROBLEM. Saying "Upload or bugger off"
does NOT solve this problem.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: http://regebro.wordpress.com/
Python 3 Porting: http://python-incompatibility.googlecode.com/
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