[Catalog-sig] SourceForge mirroring

[Mark Ramm-christensen]

I've been working at SourceForge for the last few months, and we've
got an interest in helping out the python community as much as we can.
   And now that big sections of SourceForge run on python, using
packages from pypi, we've got a vested interest in making sure that
there is a high availability global mirror network for pypi packages.
 Fortunately we've got a network of people who have volunteered to
host open source projects for sourceforge.net.  And at EuroPython
somebody mentioned to me that we could work together to improve pypi
package delivery, which seems obvious in retrospect.

So, here's my proposal, we could mirror any open source packages on
pypi onto the sourceforge.net mirror network.   We can get most of the
data we need from the DOAP feed, and we could get the rest from
crawling the site, though it would be great if we could add an api for
getting the files for a project and perhaps a bit more project
metadata from pypi directly.

We can then provide a consistent link structure with a redirector to
the "best" mirror based on geo-ip data and mirror utilization, so that
you can programatically know how to get packages from our mirror
network.

My goal here is to help increase the robustness and reliability of the
pypi end of our package delivery system, and to help give back to the
python community.

Anyway, I just wanted to raise the idea here and see if there is any
interest in this idea.

--Mark Ramm