[Python-Dev] pip: cdecimal an externally hosted file and may be unreliable [sic]

[Paul Moore]

On 9 May 2014 13:06, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>> I think it's important to point out that one of the driving factors that caused
>>> me to finally push for changes and what lead to PEP438 being created was that
>>> Mercurial's external hosted was being extremely flaky. I can't remember the
>>> exact details but I want to say that over the span of a week or two I was
>>> getting massive numbers of users complaining that ``pip install Mercurial``
>>> was suddenly failing. This isn't to knock on the Mercurial folks or anything
>>> but to simply point out that these problems aren't things that just happen to
>>> (under|un)maintained software nor are they hypothetical. This PEP was born of
>>> the frustration that was being relayed to me by end users of PyPI/pip.
>>
>> So now "pip install Mercurial" always fails? And adding a flag allows
>> it to work as well as before, but no better? How did that fix the
>> issue? Seriously - I'm missing something here.
>
> No, This caused Mercurial to upload their packages to PyPI.

You're claiming that Mercurial moved to hosting on PyPI solely because
users suddenly needed to add a flag to install from pip? As opposed to
because PyPI gave them a more reliable hosting platform, for example?
OK. I certainly can't give any evidence to dispute that claim,
although I'm surprised.

Paul