[Distutils] Immutable Files on PyPI

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 28.09.2014 21:31, Donald Stufft wrote:
> Hello All!
> 
> I'd like to discuss the idea of moving PyPI to having immutable files. This
> would mean that once you publish a particular file you can never reupload that
> file again with different contents. This would still allow deleting the file or
> reuploading it if the checksums match what was there prior.
> 
> This would be good for a few reasons:
> 
> * It represents "best practices" for version numbers. Ideally if two people
>   have version "2.1" of a project, they'll have the same code, however as it
>   stands two people installing at two different times could have two very
>   different versions.
> 
> * This will make improving the PyPI infrastructure easier, in particular it
>   will make it simpler to move away from using a glusterfs storage array and
>   switch to a redudant set of cloud object stores.
> 
> 
> In the past this was brought up and a few points were brought against it, those
> were:
> 
> 1. That authors could simply change files that were hosted on not PyPI anyways
>    so it didn't really do much.
> 
> 2. That it was too hard to test a release prior to uploading it due to the
>    nature of distutils requiring you to build the release in the same command
>    as the upload.
> 
> With the fact that pip no longer hits external URLs by default, I believe that
> the first item is no longer that large of a factor. People can do whatever they
> want on external URLs of course, however if something is coming from PyPI as
> end users should now be aware of, they can know it is immutable.
> 
> Now that there is twine, which allows uploading already created packages, I
> also believe that the second item is no longer a concern. People can easily
> create a distribution using ``setup.py sdist``, test it, and then upload that
> exact thing they tested using ``twine upload <path to sdist>``.

-1.

It does happen that files need to be reuploaded because of a bug
in the release process and how people manage their code is really
*their* business, not that of PyPI.

FWIW, I am getting increasingly annoyed how PyPI and pip try to dictate
the way package authors are supposed to build, manage and host their
Python packages and release process. Can we please stop this ?

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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