Having something more like CPAN would be preferable because its mirrored on over 400 sites across the world (http://mirrors.cpan.org/) and should any CPAN author decide to delete any of their modules/distros then it is still accessible via BackPAN (http://backpan.perl.org/).

I suppose this is one of the great advantages of CPAN being developed in the era of modem based internet :)

PyPI is the index; The "ruby gem" equivalent is the "python egg" (not exactly equivalent, but close enough for this discussion) And pip and easy_install are the management system.

It's surprising how little known these things are - compared to e.g. Ruby Gems, CPAN, CTAN, CRAN and npm.

Given how much of a pain in the ass it is to manage python packages, I'm not really that surprised. CPAN is distributed with perl, rubygems is packaged with ruby in most package managers, npm is actually a native part of the node project now. But pip (the only proper system for managing python packages in my opinion) isn't even a blessed third-party package, it's just another package on PyPI unless you know better already. I think python just has the trouble that they started off on the wrong foot before anyone knew what worked best, and they've been playing catch-up with various coats of paint on top of their proverbial pig.

Yes. We have the cheese shop: http://pypi.python.org/pypi

There's a few command-line programs to access it from, the most popular right now being "pip".

RubyGems doesn't have anything particularly better here, unless you're maintaining your own gem server. If Facebook deleted the repo and the gemcutter published gem, you'd be in the same boat. If gemcutter disappeared (even temporarily due to an outage), you'd also be stuck.

In general, you should mirror external dependencies to the extent you're risk-averse. Mildly paranoid startup? Fork any github repos that might disappear and that don't already have forks you trust. Running a large financial institution? Run your own gem server, apt repo, etc.