[Distutils] Python people want CPAN and how the latter came about

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> What's with the interest in having packages hosted on PyPI?

"Because it would then be more like CPAN". Some people claim that one
key of CPAN's success is that it has all files stored in the archive,
and that it then allows mirroring with rsync and ftp.

They claim that without that, PyPI can't be simple, and without that,
the requirement "Python needs CPAN" can't be met.

> I'm not specifically opposed to this, but I don't see any reason it
> would benefit anyone either.  It'd be awesome if someone could explain
> this.  Perhaps if the answer were included somewhere on PyPI or in the
> distutils documentation, more people would see the light and upload
> their packages.

For all use cases except of mirroring, I don't see the need to upload,
either. For mirroring, it would be easier to write mirroring tools if
all packages uploaded their code (assuming you want to end up with a
complete off-line mirror).

Regards,
Martin