[Distutils] Outdated packages on pypi

[Steve Dower]

On 13Jul2016 1252, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
> The primary thing would be to have a banner on the page and a warning
> from `pip install´.  Those of us close to the heart of the Python
> community already have various ways of reading the tea leaves to know
> that things are likely to be unmaintained or bitrotting; the main
> purpose of such a feature would be to have an automated way for people
> who /don't/ personally know all the prominent package authors and see
> them at conferences and meetups all the time to get this information.
>  For example: nobody should be using PIL, they should be using pillow.
>  Yet there's no way for a new user to figure this out by just looking
> at https://pypi.io/project/PIL/ :).
>
> I think that the adjudication process for stealing a name from an
> existing owner is something that still bears discussion, but separately.
>  Whatever that process is, you'd have to go through it fully after a
> package becomes thusly "abandoned", and for the reasons you cite, it
> absolutely should not be automated.  Perhaps it shouldn't even be the
> way to deal with it - maybe the most you should be able to do in this
> case is to expand the "this is unmaintained" warning with a pointer to a
> different replacement name.

I like this. Maybe if a maintainer doesn't trigger the switch/publish 
anything for a year, a banner appears on the page with a publicly 
editable (votable?) list of alternative packages - thinking something 
similar to a reviews system with an "I found this review helpful" button.

Possibly such user-contributed content would be valuable anyway, but the 
"probably abandoned" state just moves it to the top of the page instead 
of the bottom.

Cheers,
Steve