Pypicloud is now in maintenance mode

[stevearc]

It has been 9 years since the first commit in 2013 of the tool that would eventually become pypicloud. It started as a project for the startup I worked for at the time. We wanted a simple way to host our own python packages, but wanted the durability/scalability of storing the files in S3 instead of on the filesystem of an EC2 instance. I left that company in 2014, and haven't used either python or pypicloud professionally since then, but I've continued the maintenance of the project. This was one of my first introductions to open source, and I found it enjoyable to work on simply for itself. Though I rarely heard from them directly, I became aware that several decently-sized companies (some that I had even heard of) were using pypicloud in their infrastructure. That was really cool! It was exciting that this side project I had created was useful to other devs; it was saving people time and preventing them from having to build a similar tool themselves. The fact that it was being used in production was validating, and it motivated a good few development sprints on pypicloud when I was between jobs.

Now, 9 years in, it feels very different. I haven't really enjoyed working on pypicloud for years, and the excitement of building something useful has faded to the feeling that I'm working a part-time second job for free. For my own quality of life, I think it's time to begin stepping away from this project.

What does this mean?

• I will not be doing any more work myself on pypicloud or the docker container
• With few exceptions, I will not be merging PRs for any reason other than bug fixes.
• If your company needs work done on pypicloud, I may be willing to do some contract work.
• If there is anyone that would like to take ownership of pypicloud and actively maintain it, please get in touch.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this project over the years. It has truly grown beyond what I imagined.

[autumnjolitz]

Hi @stevearc !

I want to say thank you for this project. I was going to report a bug today regarding sporadic false "Unable to find packages: $package_name" for packages that I know exist but seeing that you're moving on, I figured that I can live with it for now until someone takes over or I get the itch to make an asyncio implementation (not promising anyone anything haha) based upon your work. Having a small project to read the cliffs notes is quite helpful 😉 And of course having an effective pypi caching proxy with private package catchers is remarkably helpful!

Thank you for your work!

[nivintw]

Hey Steve, Happy to chat about helping maintain pypicloud, to include potentially taking ownership. Is there a way to chat that's a little bit more direct? Thanks -Tyler

[stevearc]

@nivintw sure, send me an email. It's not in my profile, but it is littered throughout my git commit history.

[benedikt-bartscher]

Hey @stevearc thanks for your awesome work.You mentioned that "If your company needs work done on pypicloud, I may be willing to do some contract work." What do you think about sponsoring instead of contract work only?

[stevearc]

@benedikt-bartscher sponsoring implies that there will be persistent, ongoing maintenance. I'm very limited on time and cannot provide that. I mentioned contract work because short development sprints are more viable, given my schedule.

[stevearc]

It's been almost a year now. I think it's time to archive this project and move on. If anyone wants fixes or features, the code is open source and you're welcome to fork. So long, and thanks everybody!