[Distutils] PEP 470, round 4 - Using Multi Repository Support for External to PyPI Package File Hosting
Nick Coghlan
ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Oct 4 09:46:27 CEST 2014
On 4 October 2014 05:08, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 2. This doesn’t actually prevent breakage, it just links the breakage to the
> version of pip/easy_install someone is using at the cost that people with
> older clients are implicitly fetching things, some of which may or may not
> be safe.
>
> Overall I think the goal of not breaking things is a good one, however PyPI
> isn’t a versioned thing where people can limit what version of things they run.
> It’s important just from a maintenance aspect to be able to deprecate and
> remove things over time. This will break things for people depending on those
> things of course, so it’s always a balancing act about deciding *when* exactly
> to remove something. I think that this is a good time to remove this particular
> thing because the core functionality of it’s replacement has existed for a long
> time, the actual use of the feature is quite low, and leaving it in presents an
> issue with usability and security.
It occurred to me that it's potentially desirable to decouple the
"stop advertising links for spidering from PyPI" step from the "stop
supporting link spidering in the clients" step.
My rationale is that the first is just about changing PyPI itself -
more clearly splitting the "PyPI as index" and "PyPI as repository"
roles. We can quantify that impact fairly clearly, and will have data
to make informed decisions each step of the way.
Removing the link spidering support from the *clients* is a
potentially bigger deal, as it would impact anyone that was using link
spidering *independently of PyPI*. We don't have any data on that, and
it's a decision different clients may want to approach differently.
So while PEP 470 would allow clients to *consider* dropping link
spidering support (and any new clients would be free to never add it),
it likely doesn't make sense for the PEP to commit any clients
(including pip) to a particular time frame for dropping the feature.
That would narrow the scope to just server side PyPI changes (with
client updates to report the availability of external repositories
being a quality of implementation issue rather than a hard
requirement).
Regards,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
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