[Distutils] Warehouse Migration Plan

[Donald Stufft]

So, in the spirit of not treating distutils-sig like an adversary, here's
the main thing I've been working on lately with regards to PyPI. None
of this is set in stone but this is the general gist of the plan for moving
things to be developed in a modern framework, as well as cleaning
up the code and getting repeatable deployments.


Warehouse Migration Plan
------------------------------------

Warehouse is currently primarily besides modeling for user accounts. It
will be deployed alongside pypi-legacy at next.pypi.python.org in the near
future. Initially it will have zero user facing value.

As time goes on the database tables will be migrated from being "owned"
by pypi-legacy to being "owned" by Warehouse. This primarily means that
the schema definition and migration of those tables will be controlled by
Warehouse. As tables are migrated to Warehouse ownership the PyPI code
will be updated to reflect any changes in schema (without modification to
what end users see).

Once all tables that are going to be kept have been migrated, we will have
a shared database that is accessible from both pypi-legacy and Warehouse.
From this point Warehouse will begin evolving "legacy" views such as the
simple and other pieces of API. The UX itself will continue to be ignored and
focus will be on getting feature parity for automated tooling. Changes in
behavior on these legacy views should be minimal and discussed on
distutils-sig.

Once the legacy views are finished people will be encouraged to test their
real world workloads against those reimplemented legacy APIs. As changes
in behaviors, missing functionality, or bugs are found they will be rectified or
declared unsupported.

During this time work on the UI of Warehouse will begin focusing on maintaing
feature parity but with no promises of no changes to the url structure or UX.

Once Warehouse gains feature parity with PyPI and has gotten enough testing
against it's APIs then pypi-legacy will be retired and Warehouse will move from
next.pypi.python.org to pypi.python.org. From there it will evolve on it's own without
needing to keep pypi-legacy in sync.


Specification & Acceptance Testing
------------------------------------------------

I do not want a packaging index server to be specified by implementation, so as
the legacy API is ported over to Warehouse a specification will be drafted. This
spec will represent the "promise" that PyPI makes about the API it presents to be
consumed by machines. During the migration any behavior not codified inside of
the spec is considered implementation defined behavior and backwards compatibility
for that behavior will not be promised.

In addition to a defined specification A repository of acceptance tests will be developed.
These tests will be part of the test framework for any future changes to Warehouse
but will be maintained separately alongside the specification. They will also allow
any alternative implementation (such as DevPI) to test themselves against the spec.


-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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