npm, PyPi overtake CPAN

[Mark Fowler]

On Friday, May 24, 2013, Nicholas Clark wrote:

1) in an online environment, just a URL to a master site is a single point
> of
>    failure. Start to chain enough dependencies, and however reliable they
> are
>    at building and testing, it doesn't work if you can't download the code
>    because one server is down


How true is that these days though? PyPi isn't a single server that can go
down. It's now running on a CDN[1], and even in the event of a failure of
the origin, the CDN will keep serving last known good (much like the
situation with a mirror and the master mirror failing.)

Obviously it's not perfect - infrequently pulled traffic might not be on
the CDN when a failure occurs (I suspect people on this list who work for
fastey can provide us the exact details if they wanted) but the advantages
of instant update of changes to all 'mirrors' are not to be sneezed at.

I guess I'm saying its not as cut and dry as it used to be.

Mark

[1] as of about ten hours ago -
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2013-May/020849.html