Simon Willison’s Weblog

What to do when PyPI goes down. My deployment scripts tend to rely on PyPI these days (they install dependencies in to a virtualenv) which makes me distinctly uncomfortable. Jacob explains how to use the PyPI mirrors that are starting to come online, but that won’t help if the PyPI listing links to an externally hosted file which starts to 404, as happened with the python-openid package quite recently (now fixed). The comments on the post discuss workarounds, including hosting your own PyPI mirror or bundling tar.gz files of your dependencies with your project.

# 21st July 2010, 10:19 am / deployment, jacob-kaplan-moss, packaging, pip, pypi, python, setuptools, recovered

A history of Python packaging. A comprehensive history by Martijn Faassen, who argues that the existing set of tools tools works fine and has been working fine for several years.

# 10th November 2009, 8:48 pm / martijnfaassen, python, packaging, setuptools, distutils

On packaging. James Bennett discusses the problems with setuptools (and ruby gems), and recommends Ian Bicking’s pip as a setuptools replacement.

# 14th December 2008, 4:57 pm / python, setuptools, pip, ian-bicking, james-bennett, ruby, gems

Kevin Teague explains the Python packaging ecosystem. The distinction between setuptools, PyPI, distutils, eggs, easy_install, pkg_resources and zc.buildout used to make my head spin. Kevin Teague’s outstanding explanation made it all make sense.

# 15th September 2008, 2:06 pm / pypi, python, distutils, eggs, setuptools, easyinstall, buildout, kevinteague, django

Python on Leopard. readline is finally bundled, so the interactive interpreter works correctly without hunting around for frustratingly elusive add-ons. easy_install is bundled as well.

# 31st October 2007, 5:53 pm / python, readline, leopard, setuptools, osx, christopher-lenz