[Zope-dev] "ZTK" futures: one big package?

[Chris McDonough]

On 5/13/09 1:22 PM, Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> That said, given your other arguments in prior mails today, I'll give up
>> agitating for any packaging changes on this maillist, because it's pretty much
>> impossible to argue against the article of faith that there is some presumed
>> majority of
>> thousands-of-people-who-depend-on-those-packages-as-distributed-now-and-whom-will-forever-want-to-do-so-and-whose-world-will-explode-if-we-take-them-away.
>
> meta: I don't like how you say that this is an article of faith, because
> you seem to imply that we're superstitious with this.

No one on this list has yet claimed that such a repackaging would harm them 
irreparably personally.  So I assume we're catering to the great silent 
majority.  Without identifying the actual size of that group, we'll be unable to 
ever make any change because it might harm "someone".  I consider this a pretty 
untenable place to be in over the long haul.

> Concretely I have quite a few codebases around that depend on the
> current package list being present. They'd stop working if we suddenly
> withdrew these packages from PyPI. I think there are quite a few others
> in the same position.

You (in particular) could almost certainly keep these working by setting up a 
private index.  Which you should probably do anyway, or at least be using 
zc.sourcerelease or so, for actual repeatability for important systems that need 
to keep running forever and cannot be changed.

IOW, the union of these two sets is the null set:

- people for whom repeatable builds is an absolute requirement

- people who use PyPI to build their systems in production

IMO, PyPI should be treated as a place to advertise your software; not to use as 
a must-be-up-all-the-time and must-give-me-a-repeatable-build-forever system.

>>> We can also add 'reusable' to the metadata tags in PyPI in addition to this.
>> I think this is a reasonable workaround if the packaging structure does not change.
>
> I'll start putting up a few of these notifications today.

OK.

- C