"CPAN" SIG?

[D'Arcy J.M. Cain]

Tom Loredo <loredo at spacenet.tn.cornell.edu> wrote:
> Vaults is great.  However I strongly feel there is a need, if not
> for CPAN, then at least for mirrors of Vaults.  As someone who has
> just written a grant proposal seeking support for a Python
> project, I find it worrisome that Python's main source of info
> about 3rd party libraries is a single site.  In particular, Vaults
> has been incredibly unstable in the last month or so; a web page
> supporting my proposal links to it and I am just praying that
> when the reviewers visit it, it's not one of the days that clicking
> on the Vaults link returns an error message.  There have been
> many days like that lately.

There should be fewer lately.  Let me tell you what has been going on.

Recently we did a major upgrade on Vex.Net.  All third party packages
were upgraded and rebuilt as well.  Since then the VoP (which is built
on Python and PostgreSQL) has been giving us troubles.  Specifically,
the database engine kept crashing.  We finally figured out that it was
the VoP database that was the problem and we created a second instance
of the engine to handle it.  This has confirmed that the problem is
related to the VoP.  We are now watching it carefully and are in the
process of writing a script to monitor and restart as necessary.  I
have also had Tim send me the schema for the database so that I can
look it over and possibly help in case the problem is there.  I will
also be helping him go through the code to see if we can find where
it crashes.  Meanwhile, the Vaults should be up most of the time now.

> The collective efforts of Python programmers are too vital a
> component of the case for Python to be subject to this kind
> of single-point failure.  We need something broader and more
> stable.

This, of course, is a different issue.  Have you contacted Tim about
doing some mirroring?  As long as you can install PostgreSQL and PyGreSQL
you should be able to run the same code.  You may even be able to help
debug the current problems.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at vex.net>           |  Democracy is three wolves
http://www.vex.net/                        |  and a sheep voting on         
+1 416 425 1212     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.