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

[Paul Moore]

On 31 August 2015 at 10:43, Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net> wrote:
> 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.

There's been a few posts now about how the new system is or is not
like Linux package management systems. As a Windows user, my view of
Linux package management is pretty limited. To me it seems like the
basic approach is, if a package is in the official repo, you can just
do apt-get install (or yum install) and it works. If the package is
elsewhere, you need to find out where (usually manually, as far as I
can see) and then do a bit of config, and then the package is
available just like standard ones. That's pretty much the same as the
proposed solution for PyPI/pip.

If there's any additional functionality that Linux systems provide,
could someone summarise it from an end user POV for me? (And maybe
also point out why I'd never noticed it as a naive Linux user!) To me,
that's a key to whether this PEP is missing something important
relative to those systems.

Paul