Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

> On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 03:48:36AM +0530, Arun Isaac wrote:
>> 
>> >> Could you switch to upstream's github release tarball instead?
>> >> https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/archive/v1.4.0.tar.gz
>> >>
>> >> LGTM, otherwise!
>> >
>> > Is there a reason to prefer one over the other?
>> >
>> > I ask because, typically, these unammed GitHub tarballs are not actual
>> > releases prepared by the maintainers, but just a snapshot of the Git
>> > repo, created automatically by GitHub for each tag. PyPi tends to
>> > contain the "real" release in cases like this.
>> 
>> I thought it is better to depend directly on the upstream source
>> (github, in this case) than on an intermediary (pypi) who has also
>> packaged the software. If we use pypi, Guix becomes some kind of second
>> order package repository that depends on pypi, the primary package
>> repository. WDYT?
>
> My understanding is that project maintainers upload their releases to
> PyPi, not that PyPi packages the release for them. Is that incorrect?

This is true. The PyPi releases are often different from the raw
sources, look for the magic lines "packages" and "package_data" in
setup.py[0] to see what is included/excluded in the PyPi archive.
Unfortunately some packages also exlude tests, in which case it's okay
to use the upstream repository.

Some projects provide PGP signatures on PyPi as well, which is great.
Take matplotlib for example:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/matplotlib (PGP signed tarball, 52MiB)
https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/releases (no signature, 51MiB)

[0] https://packaging.python.org/distributing/