[Distutils] Fwd: The state of PyPI

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:
...
>
> I understand where you're coming from but, ..

Sorry, I don't understand what you imply here.


> I think it's saner to rely on proven technology
> than to invent our own protocol. NIH?

Ah sorry I misunderstood then. I thought CloudFront was a proprietary
platform, with its own protocol.

If you're saying that we can move away from CloudFront at any time and
have the same feature elsewhere, then it's perfect.

If you're saying that CloudFront is proven technology and that we
should not worry about relying on them, then I think we can do better
for the community to get locked-in for this, and continue to work on
an open protocol where everyone can participate by providing a spare
server.  But maybe that's just me ?

Most of the mirroring protocol was inspired by Perl's CPAN btw.

>
> BTW, in looking at PEP 381 (yeah, I know, I'm a bad person
> for waiting so long)

Yeah, started around 2 years ago, but comments are always welcome  :)

>  I have lots of reservations about the protocol:
>
> - It's potentially complex to implement efficiently, especially given that:
>
> - We've had problems with mirrors getting out of date, meaning that,
> potentially, clients should
>  check multiple indexes,

Yeah, mirrors do get out of sync. There's a freshness time stamp.

But the use case is usually: PyPI is down, we fallback to a mirror. I
don't think it's more complicated than this.

>
> - It either requires extra dns calls or relies to heavily on the last
> mirror, which is probably likely
>  to be the least reliable.

Once you have the list, I don't think you require extra call.

see http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/84280fac98b9/Lib/packaging/pypi/mirrors.py

>
> Life is short. We don't have to invent this ourselves.

Ah well, yeah -- Not sure what you are proposing right now.

If you imply that everything should be solved on server-side, and that
we should not have mirroring

>
> Jim
>
> --
> Jim Fulton
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton
>



-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org