[Distutils] Create formal process for claiming 'abandoned' packages

[holger krekel]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 14:16 +0000, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> Donald Stufft <donald <at> stufft.io> writes:
> > PyPI inherinently has complete control over who owns what name on PyPI.
> 
> Political authority does not derive from technical control, though.

valid point IMO.

> > As Toshio said that are situations where it makes *obvious* sense to transfer
> > ownership of a project. Using Django as an pretty good example here, There are
> > four people able to make releases there, until fairly recently there were only
> > two if I recall. I don't think anyone would be against PyPI transfering
> > ownership of Django to another active core developer of Django in the event
> > that all of the people with permissions on PyPI were gone in some fashion.
> 
> Assuming the remaining Django core developers agree on it, then, yes, that
> can make sense. That's because they are the primary authors of the project
> (even though they might not have been listed as such on PyPI).
> 
> The case people are worried about is whether someone who is not part of the
> original project author(s) or maintainer(s) can get assigned the PyPI project.
> In that case people should use one of the forks; there's no reason for PyPI
> to crown a successor.

It can be considerable effort to communicate new names throughout the
community.  FWIW I am pretty happy that e.g. for pytest-cov we got a new
maintainer because people use that module heavily, it's advertised in
many places, part of tox.ini files etc, yet the original author did not
respond and did not release updates for years.

> > To that I think it'd be
> > great to have a documented procedure for doing transfers and even rough
> > guidelines as to when it makes sense to do it, but that ultimately it would be
> > a decision up to the maintainers of PyPI (currently Richard and myself, though
> > I rarely get involved in that side of things).
> 
> I think the "rough guidelines" should actually be quite strict about it
> (see above). Also, publicity is important (see Daniel's original post).

I think a documented procedure makes sense.

FWIW i haven't heart of any complaints from original authors/maintainers
regarding the way how ownership was transferred, in the last 10 years or so.
Many people are not aware that transfering ownership is possible.

best,
holger

> Regards
> 
> Antoine.
> 
> 
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