My “speed up pypi installs” PEP438 has been accepted and transition phase 1 is live: as a package maintainer you can speed up the installation for your packages for all your users now, with the click of a button: Login to https://pypi.python.org and then go to urls for each of your packages, and specify that all release files are hosted from pypi.python.org. Or add explicit download urls with an MD5. Tools such as pip or easy_install will thus avoid any slow crawling of third party sites.

Many thanks to Carl Meyer who helped me write the PEP, and Donald Stufft for implementing most of it, and Richard Jones who accepted it today! And thanks also to the distutils-sig discussion participants, in particular Phillip Eby and Marc-Andre Lemburg.