[Distutils] Reviving PEP 470 - Removing External Hosting support on PyPI

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 11:12 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> On September 1, 2015 at 12:15:56 AM, Nick Coghlan (ncoghlan at gmail.com) wrote:
>> On 1 September 2015 at 05:53, Donald Stufft wrote:
>> > The top packages look a bit different than it did 10 months ago, surprisingly
>> > to me PIL has severely dropped off from where it had ~63k 10 months ago and it
>> > now has 5.5k, however pygame has risen from 2.6k 10 months ago to ~32k.
>>
>> I can provide plausible explanations for both of those:
>>
>> * Pillow adoption progressively displacing PIL usage
>> * Pygame Zero lowering barriers to entry for PyGame usage in education
>>
>>
>
> Seems reasonable, Pygame doesn’t seem to have had a release since 2009. This is a common theme amongst most of the projects still using external hosting, they were added at a time that PyPI either didn’t have file uploading or it’s file uploading was unreliable and it made more sense to host externally. I think that also explains why almost none of them switched away from the unverifiable method to the verifiable method and why the amount of traffic per project drops sharply after the first handful, because it’s largely older projects that may or may not even actually work anymore.
>
> In the case of Pygame, I see that the pygame zero instructions say to install from https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame. I don’t know of that’s an official pygame repository or if someone forked it or what, but if that’s owned by the same people, maybe we can get them to make a release to PyPI.

Looking at the download url that PyPI points to:

   http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml

then I get the impression that this page was designed to be read by
humans only, and if pip/easy_install ever do anything useful with it
then it's by pure luck only. The whole page is about how you should go
about choosing and obtaining the correct platform-specific binary
package.

(Also, what does it meant that https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pygame is 404?)

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org