[Catalog-sig] an immutable mirror of PyPI

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Please note that I'm talking about the idea of an immutable mirror,
not PyPI itself - unfortunately, you've cut away that important
context from my email.

Alan Franzoni wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 11:10 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> Some possible reasons:
> 
>>  * renaming packages (e.g. due to a poor initial package name
>>   choice)
> 
> This is not a good reason, IMHO. You can go on with new versions and a
> new name, maybe you could want to deprecate the old package, but it's
> not a good reason to remove it.

I think undoing mistakes in package names is a very
good reason to remove them. As package author you don't want such
mistakes to stay on the net forever, if you can avoid it.

>>  * legal action (copyright, trademark, DMCA, license issues, etc)
>>
>>  * removal of malicious packages (e.g. script kiddy stuff in
>>   setup.py)
>>  * seriously broken builds (e.g. that cause users to lose data)
> 
> This is would make a good reason for package removal, but not for
> version reassignment. I.E. if I delete version 0.4.3 because it
> deleted my /usr instead of /usr/share/mylib/content, then I would be
> right at removing it, but there's no point in allowing any other
> package to take back 0.4.3. It's simply gone.

I'm not sure I understand what you want to say. I wasn't talking
about version reassignment in the above cases.

>>  * reassigning package names (not sure whether that's possible with
>>   PyPI, but it certainly happens in the wild every now and then)
> 
> I'm not sure about what you mean here.

Author A releases a package X, then drops the idea and removes
the package, freeing up the name for others to use. Later on,
author B uses the name X for something different and creates
a new package X with a new set of releases.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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