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

[R. David Murray]

On Fri, 09 May 2014 11:39:02 -0400, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> On May 9, 2014, at 9:58 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> > On 09.05.2014 13:44, Donald Stufft wrote:
> >> On May 9, 2014, at 4:12 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> > I snipped the rest of the discussion and reliability, using
> > unmaintained packages and projects using their own mirrors (which
> > should really be the standard, not an exceptional case),
> > because it's not really leading anywhere:
> 
> Using your own mirror shouldn’t be the standard if all you’re doing
> is automatically updating that mirror. It’s a hack to get around
> unreliability and it should be seen of as a sign of a failure to provide
> a service that people can rely on and that’s how I see it. People
> depend on this service and it’s irresponsible to not treat it as a
> critical piece of infrastructure.

I don't understand this.  Why it is our responsibility to provide a
free service for a large project to repeatedly download a set of files
they need?  Why does it not make more sense for them to download them
once, and only update their local copies when they change?  That's almost
completely orthogonal to making the service we do provide reliable.

For perspective, Gentoo requests that people only do an emerge sync at
most once a day, and if they have multiple machines to update, that they
only do one pull, and they update the rest of their infrastructure from
their local copy.

As another point of information for comparison, Gentoo downloads files
from wherever they are hosted first, and only if that fails falls back to
a Gentoo provided mirror (if I remember correctly...I think the Gentoo
mirror copy doesn't always exist?).

--David