I'm a frequent helper in the IRC channel for the Pylons web framework. Pylons is installed from eggs using easy_install, and when Cheeseshop is down (or so slow it might as well be down), it gives a bad impression of our framework and Python in general. It took us half an hour to figure out how to bootstrap setuptools onto one person's machine, since ez_install.py sources from the cheeseshop, and even when we got that installed, bootstrapping the rest of Pylons was very troublesome.
If something as widely used as eggs is going to have a single point of failure like the Cheeseshop, we can't have it going down. I'm sure there are other solutions, but my suggestion is simply to have mirrors. It works for Debian, after all. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list