[Distutils] What to do about the PyPI mirrors

[Lennart Regebro]

> -1 - maybe I don't have the right to speak up on CDN usage, but personally I
> feel it's a bad idea to delegate overall PyPI availability exclusively to a
> commercial third party.

Well, it's been done, and it was always a better idea than the way
mirrors was implemented.

> It's OK for me that we're using them to improve PyPI
> availability, but completely putting our faith in their hands, doesn't sound
> right to me.

We must put out faith in somebody's hands with regards to PyPI. That
hasn't changed.

> That's something that the mirroring infrastructure should have been
> constructed for. I completely agree that the way the mirroring was
> established was way sub-optimal. I think we can do better.

Only by building our own CDN. We won't do better than the ones that exist.

> Well, now we have one breakage point more which keeps annoying me.

We do? How?

> Also, not everyone wants or needs auto-detection the way that the protocol
> describes it. I personally just hand-pick a mirror (my own, hah) and keep
> using that.

I agree that this is probably the best choice, and you can still do that.

> I'd like to avoid breakage. Again, if you don't let me choose where to spend
> my time, I'd rather invest the time I need for cleaning up the breakage into
> something constructive.

The only breakage I can see in this proposal is that the [a-z] dns
names go away. That would take four months. I think perhaps that's a
bit short. I don't see why we can't keep them around for much longer.

A way to find mirrors is needed, but perhaps not automatic, but for
when pypi goes down.

//Lennart