At 02:52 PM 7/11/2007 -0400, Benji York wrote: >Phillip J. Eby wrote: >>This schism between the idea of neatly cataloging things, versus >>being able to actually *use* that cataloging for practical purposes >>by automated tools (as opposed to being usable only to human >>readers), seems to be at the heart of some of the current discussion. > >Wasn't there a proposal to merge the catalog-sig and distutils-sig?
Merging the lists isn't going to merge the people or change anybody's point of view. The difference in SIGs reflects, for the most part, a difference in Special Interest -- the "I" in SIG. Or another way of looking at the "I" is "Itch". The people who have been working on cataloging already have their itch basically scratched; PyPI has been sufficient for their needs for some time now. The packaging people, OTOH, have an ever-increasing itch, as setuptools hits its "hockey stick" growth phase both in user volume and package volume. This is understandably, of little interest to people who don't do lots of packaging, deployment, and distribution. I absolutely don't want to disparage the good folks who have made PyPI what it is today, and I totally understand their not wanting to take on the burden of supporting a tool they don't use or care about themselves, just because it happens to use PyPI. But it seems to me that for folks whose Interest/Itch is not merely finding packages, but *using* them, a different infrastructure is needed, treating PyPI as the ultimate *source* of the information, without being also its sole *distribution* point, or query interface. There are plenty of folks who have offered to spend funds, provide hosting, etc. for PyPI mirrors or alternatives -- perhaps we should create a SIG to start figuring out *how* to provide that, ideally while creating the least amount of additional service burden on the Cheeseshop. Ideally, we could then support having the Cheeseshop redirect existing clients to a nearby distribution index, while newer clients could use a distribution index to start with. Such a discussion would need to resolve certain design tradeoffs such as speed and availability vs. freshness of the index vs. load on the primary Cheeseshop vs. ability to have lots of mirrors/distribution indexes vs. ease of selecting one, etc. But I believe the main reason why such discussion hasn't gone very far at this point is because the packaging-interest folks have been looking to the cataloging-interest folks to provide direction and focus to the discussion of the tradeoffs, even though these things lie mostly outside their itch/interest. I think it is more likely to be productive for the packaging-interest folks to get clear about what they want first, and then the cataloging-interest folks can chime in if they see something being proposed that might be especially harmful to the Cheeseshop's availability or performance. _______________________________________________ Catalog-SIG mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
