P.J. Eby:

The cardinal rule of successful groupware is that those who put information into the system must receive a proportional benefit for their efforts, or those who want to get information out of the system will not see anything coming out.

Lately PyPI, the Python package index, has been having some availability issues. When PyPI goes down it really hurts Python developers: we can’t install new packages, bring up new development environments or virtualenvs, or deploy code with depedencies.

Work is ongoing – see PEP 381 – to add much-needed resiliency to PyPI, and the fruits of these labors are starting to become available. In particular, a number of PyPI mirrors are now available: b.pypi.python.org, c.pypi.python.org, and d.pypi.python.org are up and running. Each mirror has fairly up-to-date copies [1] of all the packages and metadata on PyPI.