Hey! First, for anyone who isn't aware we recently migrated PyPI and TestPyPI so that instead of storing files and documentation locally (really in a glusterfs cluster) it will store them inside of S3. This will reduce maintenance overhead of running PyPI by two servers since we'll no longer need to run our own glusterfs cluster as well as improve the reliaiblity and scalability of the PyPI service as a whole since we've had nothing but problems from glusterfs in this regard.
One of the things that this brought to light was that the documentation upload ability in PyPI is something that is not often used* however it represents something which is one of our slowest routes. It's not a well supported feature and I feel that it's going outside of the core competancy for PyPI itself and instead PyPI should be focused on the files themselves. In addition since the time this was added to PyPI a number of free services or cheap services have came about that allow people to sanely upload raw document without a reliance on any particular documentation system and we've also had the rise of ReadTheDocs for when someone is using Sphinx as their documentation system. I think that it's time to retire this aspect of PyPI which has never been well supported and instead focus on just the things that are core to PyPI. I don't have a fully concrete proposal for doing this, but I wanted to reach out here and figure out if anyone had any ideas. The rough idea I have currently is to simply disable new documentation uploads and add two new small features. One will allow users to delete their existing documentation from PyPI and the other would allow them to register a redirect which would take them from the current location to wherever they move their documentation too. In order to prevent breaking documentation for projects which are defunct or not actively maintained we would maintain the archived documentation (sans what anyone has deleted) indefinetely. Ideally I hope people start to use ReadTheDocs instead of PyPI itself. I think that ReadTheDocs is a great service with heavy ties to the Python community. They will do a better job at hosting documentation than PyPI ever could since that is their core goal. In addition there is a dialog between ReadTheDocs and PyPI where there is an opportunity to add integration between the two sites as well as features to ReadTheDocs that it currently lacks that people feel are a requirement before we move PyPI's documentation to read-only. Thoughts? * Out of ~60k projects only ~2.8k have ever uploaded documentation. It's not easy to tell if all of them are still using it as their primary source of documentation though or if it's old documentation that they just can't delete. --- Donald Stufft PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
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