[Distutils] What to do about the PyPI mirrors

[holger krekel]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 17:19 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> On 6 August 2013 17:13, Noah Kantrowitz <noah at coderanger.net> wrote:
> >> Also, CPAN, like Linux distro trees, can be mirrored with rsync rather
> >> than needing a custom client. It's much easier to maintain backwards
> >> compatibility when the only required server API is the ability to
> >> serve static files.
> >>
> >
> > I will fight any attempt to do this with every fiber of my being. This kind of "dumb server" API means that any metadata indexing or searching either needs to be precomputed or implemented in a much more intelligent client. This is already somewhat the case with pip, and as someone that has to deal with multiple client implementations it makes me very sad that I can't just call a REST endpoint to know what will be installed when I do a thing. This is neither here nor there, but I wanted to stake out my grounds so I can growl when people get too close :)
> 
> I agree having a smart server is good, I just think exposing a dumb,
> easy to mirror, signed data store is good, too :)

FWIW I think CPAN is structured such that search sites operate
on mirrored data.  The master server thus can remain dumb.
Sounds like a good recipe to me.

It's a bit sad but i think even now we are struggling to meet CPAN's
architecture and ease-of-use, let alone improve on it.

holger