On Sep 21, 2014, at 7:06 PM, Antoine Pitrou <antoine@python.org> wrote:

Ethan Furman <ethan <at> stoneleaf.us> writes:
On 09/19/2014 04:13 PM, Alex Gaynor wrote:

I **strongly** concur with James here. This has flagrantly violated my
trust in
PyPI.

I would much rather packages not be reclaimed than need to think about
whether
I trust the PyPI maintainers to do it.

Having PyPI become full of cruft is not a tenable situation.

What is the problem with "cruft" exactly?

I'm opposed to the idea that a package may be "transferred" to someone
else without any explicit authorization from the original maintainer(s)
(or author(s)). It is not a matter of waiting time or tools. It is morally
unacceptable.

If you want to maintain a package and the maintainer doesn't reply,
there is a solution: fork the package (under a new name).

If you don't want to see "stale" packages, there is a solution:
build an optional filter into PyPI that only shows packages
which have received an update in the last 12/24/36 months.

Regards

Antoine.

The problem with cruft is they make it more difficult to find things for end

users who often times don't know what they are looking for. This is especially

bad when you have a once popular library/tool for which the maintainer is no

longer available. It's already a daunting task for someone to select a library

that does something they need to do if they aren’t already familiar with the

ecosystem. Adding "landmines" in the form of projects which look to solve their

problem but where there is no-one to help them if they run into a bug or who

can release a bug fix is fairly unfriendly.

Circling back to django-registration, we can see the extra confusion this can

cause when a maintainer stops maintaining a popular package. You end up with

a multitude of forks, each slightly incompatible and with different features,

bugs, etc. Now in the case of django-registration the author *is* available

and wishes to retain control of django-registration, so that's fine, but you

can hopefully see the sort of confusion that a maintainer going missing can

cause?

This isn't a problem that can be automatically solved because there's no

programatic way to differentiate between "stable" and "abandoned", especially

when you want to consider "abandoned but the author wants to maintain control",

"abandoned but the author is willing to give it up", and "abandoned and the

author is no longer available" differently.