[Distutils] PyPi not allowing duplicate filenames

[Chris Barker]

Hi all,

PyPi does not allow duplicate file names -- this makes lots of sense,
because you really don't want people to go to PyPi one day and grab a file,
and then go there another day, grab a file with exactly the same name, and
have it be a different file.

However....

We are all too human, and make mistakes when doing a release. All to often
someone pushed a broken file up to PyPi, often realizes it pretty quickly
-- before anyone has a chance to even download it (or only the dev team as,
for testing...).

In fact, I was in a sprint last summer, and we decided to push our  package
up to PyPi -- granted, we were all careless amateurish noobs, but we ended
up making I think 4! minor version bumps because we had done something
stupid in the sdist.

Also -- the latest numpy  release got caught in this, too:

"""
* We ran into a problem with pipy not allowing reuse of filenames and a
  resulting proliferation of *.*.*.postN releases. Not only were the names
  getting out of hand, some packages were unable to work with the postN
  suffix.
"""

So -- I propose that PyPi allow projects to replace existing files if they
REALLY REALLY want to.

You should have to jump through all sorts of hoops, and make it really
clear that it is a BAD IDEA in the general case, but it'd be good to have
it be possible.

After all -- PyPi does not take on responsibility for anything else about
what's in those packages, and Python itself is all about "we're all
consenting adults here"

I suppose we could even put in some heuristics about how long the file as
been there, how many times it's been downloaded, etc.

Just a thought.....I really hate systems that don't let me roll back
mistakes, even when I discover them almost immediately...

-CHB











-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

Emergency Response Division
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Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
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