[Catalog-sig] an immutable mirror of PyPI

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

On 07/05/2011 12:48 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> Is there any interest in running an immutable mirror of PyPI on
>> python.org as a service to package users?
>
> AFAIK, gocept is running such a mirror for the own purposes.
> You might want to partner up with them.
>
> I can put you in touch with Christian Theune/GoCept if you like.

I know Christian quite well, I can easily contact them. I hadn't 
realized they were running an immutable mirror.

> In general, I find the idea to use a potentially volatile service
> for running buildout or similar tools a hazardous approach to
> software configuration management, esp. in production environments.
>
> Why don't you just download the packages you have tested and
> ship them with your application, bypassing all the network
> and usability issues of a dynamic catalog server ?

Yeah, that's one way to resolve this.

It's just a lot more work to do this during development than updating a 
version number in a configuration file when you need a new version.

Concerning relying on networked resources for the installation of tested 
packages, Linux distributions have been doing this for years; I don't 
think that's a fundamentally flawed approach.

PyPI just is at this point where it works 99.99% percent of the time, 
but it allows sudden surprises to pop up.

Regards,

Martijn