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

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> 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.

For this specific need, automated solutions do exist, allowing either
explicit specification of the packages that you want to have available,
or transparently caching all the ones that you happened to access.

Regards,
Martin