[Distutils] How Python can have CPAN.

[Sebastien Douche]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 11:47, Lennart Regebro <lregebro at jarn.com> wrote:

> Out of a total of 8522 packages on PyPI, there are 203 packages (2.4%)
> whose latest release does not provide either a package on PyPI, nor a
> download url. Of these 16 does not provide any contact data.

Hi Lennart,
Glad to see someone is interested by a PyPI mirror, I have one here
and it's a pity.

Statistics (from the creation of the mirror / proxy. The goal is to
avoid external download, like an internal debian mirror):
2009-12-15 21:37:20,855 DEBUG  Found (cached):         0
2009-12-15 21:37:20,855 DEBUG  Stored (downloaded):    15367
2009-12-15 21:37:20,855 DEBUG  Not found (404):        188
2009-12-15 21:37:20,855 DEBUG  Invalid packages:       0
2009-12-15 21:37:20,855 DEBUG  Invalid URLs:           54
2009-12-15 21:37:20,855 DEBUG  Runtime:                208m38s

The root issue (for me) is: packages out of the PyPI. A lot of broken
links, broken html pages or stupid scripts (cf. old SourceForge).

Some examples:
WARNING Unload downloading http://wiki.woodpecker.org.cn/moin/UliPad (timed out)
WARNING Unload downloading http://launchpad.net/mcrepogen/+download
(The read operation timed out)
WARNING Unload downloading http://launchpad.net/mcrepogen (The read
operation timed out)
WARNING Unload downloading https://launchpad.net/lovely.tal (The read
operation timed out)
WARNING Unload downloading ffnet.sourceforge.net (unknown url type:
ffnet.sourceforge.net)
WARNING Unload downloading http://pysqlite.org/ ((-3, 'Temporary
failure in name resolution'))


> Is there significant interest in doing this?

YES! ;)

In that case, what answer
> options should we have?

Always upload a version to PyPI, the only way to have a reliable,
solid and smart PyPI and an easy way to proxy-ing. Think the case
where SF is down: No docutils. Zope server down: no Zope 2, no Zope3,
no ZTK, no buildout... With a full mirror I don't care...

Note: I'm very happy when I see a distribution with:
- a description
- a summary (with examples if necessary)
- a changelog (quick way to see what's new)
- the name of the author and email (or maintainer)
- contain files (with distribution name = package name, not MyPackage
and mypackage)


Like this :
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.portlet.relateditems/0.3.0

And not this:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-sphinxdoc/0.2



Cheers

-- 
Sebastien Douche <sdouche at gmail.com>
Twitter: http://bit.ly/afkrK (agile, python, open source)