[Python-Dev] pip: cdecimal an externally hosted file and may be unreliable [sic]

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 11:39 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> I agree with Stefan that the warning message wording is less
> than ideal. You'd normally call such blanket statements FUD,
> esp. since there are plenty external hosting services which
> are reliable and safe to use.

No, it's not FUD. Every external dependency adds another thing that
can fail. I was just arguing this with one of my younger brothers this
evening; he had some stuff stored in Google Docs, and he couldn't
access it because of some outage. With a local git/hg repository, he
would have had all his data right there, and even losing access to a
central hub server just means you can't pull/push. Using someone
else's server makes you depend on that server and everything in
between.

Obviously that's often a cost worth paying (hey, I'm posting this from
Gmail, so I completely lose access to all these emails if it's
inaccessible), but it's a legitimate concern, not FUD.

(That doesn't stop the wording from being "less than ideal", though.)

ChrisA