[Catalog-sig] an immutable mirror of PyPI

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 2:12 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Sure, but those are distributions of collections of packages
> that are known to work together (most of the time), not catalogs
> like PyPI, which don't provide any compatibility or availability
> guarantees.
>
> I was essentially suggesting to setup your own distribution or
> distribution server to avoid the issues with missing compatibility
> checks or loss of availability of a resource.

Yes, it's something to consider, and it's not too difficult to convert
a project to a bunch of downloaded tarballs before deployment, but
it's less friendly for sharing projects between developers; I'd have
to maintain a separate distribution of lots of packages per project in
my own version control system, once per project, right? Or I have to
start maintaining my own distribution server.

I don't want to maintain my own distribution server if I can share it.
An immutable pypi would be a good distribution server, and mirroring
is already practiced for PyPI and that would help with availability.
It'd be a shared way to solve this problem as opposed to be everybody
solving the problem for themselves.

>> PyPI just is at this point where it works 99.99% percent of the time,
>> but it allows sudden surprises to pop up.
>
> I think that's just a coincident, not really a feature :-)

Yes, I realize that, that's why I initiated this discussion in the
first place. It's only a few small steps away from a shared solution.

Regards,

Martijn