<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On May 31, 2013, at 6:57 AM, Radomir Dopieralski <<a href="mailto:sheep@sheep.art.pl">sheep@sheep.art.pl</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">Hello,<br><br>is there a defined process for removing useless entries from PyPi?<br><br>I was looking for a name for a new project, and as a part of that, I searched<br>on the Python Package Index to see if the names I came up with are not taken<br>already. I stumbled upon this:<br><br><a href="https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fun/1.0.0">https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fun/1.0.0</a><br><br>Please note that there is absolutely no information about this entry. There<br>is no way to contact the author and ask him if he would be willing to give<br>up that name, no website, not even a license or description. If you look into<br>the uploaded source code, you will see that it's just a "hello world" program.<br><br>That's not a problem for me, I just picked a different name for my package.<br>Even if I wanted to use that name, I could add a prefix or suffix to it, to make<br>it unique. But then I looked through the list of the entires and checked the<br>ones that had no description or their description was suspicious. Just with the<br>letter A I got:<br><br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/42/0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Aaronyoungnester/1.4.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ABC/0.0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/abhi/2.0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/acme.sql/0.0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/affix/1.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/agg2567/1.1.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/agg2567/1.1.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/airstream/0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ajl_nester/1.1.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/akali/1.3.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/alexis/0.1<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/amoi/.lol.<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/aodag3/1.0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/arch/0.0.1<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/arounded/0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/AthleteClass/1.0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelist/1.1.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelist_jw/1.0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelistlogan/1.3.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/atool/1.0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/awesomeness/0.0.1<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/aws-cli/0.0<br>https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ayame/0.0<br><br>All of those entries share some properties:<br><br> * no author and no way to contact the author<br> * no website, website offline or obviously not related (like google.com)<br> * no description or meaningless description<br> * no download url or uploaded code, or the code that is uploaded is just<br> a "hello world" or similar exercise<br> * no license<br><br>I think that all those properties, taken together, in practice mean that the<br>particular entry is completely useless both to the Python community and to its<br>author -- possibly being just an abandoned test. I also think that there should<br>be a defined process for requesting of removal of such entries -- so that an<br>actually useful project can take their place.<br><br>I understand that some of those entries are placeholders for projects that are<br>actively being worked upon, just not much is disclosed yet. In that case, they<br>could at least have an author contact information, a link to the repository or<br>an "development status: in planning" trove classifier. Those project would be<br>left alone.<br><br>An additional check that could be done on the PyPi side is whether the same<br>PuPi user has also some other entries that are perhaps more meaningful and<br>contain contact information. They could be then contacted and asked about the<br>status of their abandoned entries.<br><br>If such a process existed and was publicly announced in the PyPi documentation,<br>then there would be less work with this kind of maintenance, and no animosity<br>in case of a needed entry being removed -- people would know what to expect.<br><br>Thank you for all the good work on PyPi,<br><br><br>--<br>Radomir Dopieralski, http://sheep.art.pl<br>_______________________________________________<br>Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org<br>http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig<br></blockquote></div><br><div>There is no defined process. Getting one would be good. A PEP is likely warranted in order to define the process.</div><div>
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