[Distutils] Reviving PEP 470 - Removing External Hosting support on PyPI

[Wichert Akkerman]

> On 31 Aug 2015, at 11:35, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> 
> On 31.08.2015 11:05, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
>> On 31 Aug 2015, at 10:44, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> There's also another difference: Linux repos are usually managed
>>> by a single entity owning the packages, very much unlike PyPI which
>>> is merely a hosting platform and index to point to packages owned
>>> by the authors.
>> 
>> That is probably true for public repositories. However, there are also a huge number of organisations who have internal repositories for deb/rpm packages, and many of those contain third party packages. I have a couple, and most of them contain a combination of our own packages as well as collection of backports and custom packages for software that hasn’t been packaged by anyone else.
> 
> True, but for those, I think explicitly adding the index URL to
> the package installer search path is the better approach.

Sure.

> Or perhaps I misunderstood and you meant something like:
> 
> "If the package is not in my internal repo, I don't want
> pip to look it up on PyPI or anywhere else.”

I just wanted to add a bit of context, since your statement seemed to reflect a slightly different reality than mine. You do bring up a good point though. I really like the apt-preferences approach. That allows you to define some rules to set which repository should be used. You can do things like always prefer a specific repository, or do that only for specific packages, with a default rule to use whichever repository has the latest version. Very, very useful.

Wichert.