[Python-Dev] Yearly PyPI breakage

[David Wilson]

On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 12:03:48AM +0000, Brett Cannon wrote:

>     Is there something to contemplate in here? I dislike posting questions
>     instead of answers, but it seems apparent there is a problem here and it
>     continues to remain unaddressed.

> This is whole thread is off-topic precisely because all of this is
> discussed -- in the open -- on distutils-sig and decided there. If
> people feel changes need to be made like broadcasting to a wider
> audience when a change occurs, then please bring it up on
> distutils-sig.

I respectfully disagree, as this has been the default response applied
for years, and it seems friction and dissemination have not been
improved by it. Packaging is not some adjunct technicality, anyone
learning Python in the past few years at least has been taught pip
within the first week.


> But if people choose not to participate then they are implicitly
> delegating decision powers to those who do participate

I believe this is also practically rhetorical in nature. I've watched
the wars on distutils-sig for many years now, and the general strategy
is that beyond minor outside influence, the process there is occupied by
few individuals who are resistant to outside change. Outside influence
is regularly met with essay-length reponses and tangential minutia until
the energy of the challenge is expended.

As an example, one common argument is that "Donald is overworked",
however as an example, I offered a very long time ago to implement full
text indexing for PyPI search. At the time I belive I was told such
things weren't necessary, only to learn a few years later that Donald
himself implemented the same function, and it suffers from huge latency
and accuracy issues in the meantime. The solution to those problems is
of course the ever-delayed rewrite.

Over on distutils-sig, one will learn that a large amount of effort has
been poured into a rewrite of PyPI (an effort going on years now),
however the original codebase was not far from rescue (I had a local
copy almost entirely ported to Flask in a few days). There is no reason
why this effort nor any other (like full text search) should be used, as
it often is, as an argument in the decisionmaking process that largely
governs how PyPI and pip have worked in the recent years, yet it only
takes a few glances at the archives to demonstrate that it regularly is.


David