brownout request - whitelisted package

[jvanasco]

Would it be possible to provide a (temporary) whitelisted migration package to assist in upgrades, like offering pip by a name like 'pip-brownout' during this time?

I got locked out of pip for over an hour due to the brownout, then had to handle things manually. It's a bit of a pain distributing and installing a downloaded .tgz of pip onto Test and CI servers (multiple virtualenvs and the system version need to be installed).

Also as a suggestion: it would make sense to scatter the brownout window as some automated systems might not try to call pip/etc until the 2nd half of the hour.

[alex]

It shouldn't ever be the case that the brownout locks you out for an hour since it's only in affect the first N minutes of each hour.

Can you say more about what platform you're running on that hit this?

[jvanasco]

this was off a test machine at home: osx, python 2.7.13, pip 9.0.1
traffic was coming from NYC via spectrum.

[alex]

On macOS you should always be able to get a working pip by upgrading to pip 9.0.3, which can be done with https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py at all times

[dstufft]

To be clear, if you're affected by the brownouts, you'll also be affected by load testing for the duration of the load test. Which is what happened here. Unfortunately it is not super clear when you're getting a failure due to load test vs brownout (other than by looking at the status page and determining if there is a load test underway).

[brainwane]

We are now distributing the brownout window differently -- see pypi/warehouse#3411 .

I don't think we have any load tests scheduled this week, so this would be a good week to upgrade, I think.

@jvanasco were you able to get your environments upgraded?

[jvanasco]

@brainwane yes, thank you for asking. once I knew what was going on, I grabbed a tgz on my laptop and scp'd it where needed. i was just worried about how others with less experience would be able to deal with this, and those who missed the brownout windows.

[brainwane]

@jvanasco I wrote and distributed an announcement that I hope helps. Thanks for sharing your experience and watching out for people who need more guidance; I agree that it would be good to give those folks more help.

I'm closing this issue because I think the right thing to do is to advise people to use get-pip.py -- as we're advising people, in the PSF blog post and in my python-announce-list announcement, which I also sent to the pythonmac-sig list. I do not know enough about where people who use Mac OS X get heads-ups about updates, so I'd appreciate any advice you could provide on that, and any help you could offer in getting the word out.