[Catalog-sig] Deprecate External Links

[Łukasz Langa]

On 27 lut 2013, at 21:16, holger krekel <holger at merlinux.eu> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 14:49 -0500, Monty Taylor wrote:
>> On 02/27/2013 02:47 PM, Aaron Meurer wrote:
>> 
>> If we don't remove the feature from pypi itself, then it won't help the
>> folks for whom its a problem, because there will be no incentive for the
>> folks hosting their software that way to actually upload their stuff to
>> PyPI - which means that client-side disabling of external_links is
>> fairly likely to never be usable.
> 
> I can see it's tempting to just try to "force" everyone to upload
> their stuff to pypi.python.org.  I am very skeptical about this approach.

I can totally understand why users would want to "force" maintainers to upload stuff to pypi.python.org after another failed build caused by a dependency on third-party infrastructure. While our package index is not perfect, lately it seems the main problem is with external packages.

> There already is a high frustration with the packaging ecology
> in Python.  When we remove external links on the server side, installs
> for many people and companies are going to break, no matter what.

As Donald points out, we would only do this for new releases. This would break no existing releases for users. Speaking of frustration and breakage though, let's say Mercurial or python-memcached isn't available because their website is down. Where can you go? Unless you have a pip-cached copy, the answer is too often nowhere.

-- 
Best regards,
Łukasz Langa

WWW: http://lukasz.langa.pl/
Twitter: @llanga
IRC: ambv on #python-dev

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