Hi Radomir, On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 12:57 +0200, Radomir Dopieralski wrote:
Hello,
is there a defined process for removing useless entries from PyPi?
I was looking for a name for a new project, and as a part of that, I searched on the Python Package Index to see if the names I came up with are not taken already. I stumbled upon this:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fun/1.0.0
Please note that there is absolutely no information about this entry. There is no way to contact the author and ask him if he would be willing to give up that name, no website, not even a license or description. If you look into the uploaded source code, you will see that it's just a "hello world" program.
That's not a problem for me, I just picked a different name for my package. Even if I wanted to use that name, I could add a prefix or suffix to it, to make it unique. But then I looked through the list of the entires and checked the ones that had no description or their description was suspicious. Just with the letter A I got:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/42/0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Aaronyoungnester/1.4.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ABC/0.0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/abhi/2.0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/acme.sql/0.0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/affix/1.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/agg2567/1.1.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/agg2567/1.1.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/airstream/0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ajl_nester/1.1.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/akali/1.3.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/alexis/0.1 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/amoi/.lol. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/aodag3/1.0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/arch/0.0.1 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/arounded/0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/AthleteClass/1.0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelist/1.1.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelist_jw/1.0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelistlogan/1.3.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/atool/1.0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/awesomeness/0.0.1 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/aws-cli/0.0 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ayame/0.0
All of those entries share some properties:
* no author and no way to contact the author * no website, website offline or obviously not related (like google.com) * no description or meaningless description * no download url or uploaded code, or the code that is uploaded is just a "hello world" or similar exercise * no license
I think that all those properties, taken together, in practice mean that the particular entry is completely useless both to the Python community and to its author -- possibly being just an abandoned test. I also think that there should be a defined process for requesting of removal of such entries -- so that an actually useful project can take their place.
I understand that some of those entries are placeholders for projects that are actively being worked upon, just not much is disclosed yet. In that case, they could at least have an author contact information, a link to the repository or an "development status: in planning" trove classifier. Those project would be left alone.
An additional check that could be done on the PyPi side is whether the same PuPi user has also some other entries that are perhaps more meaningful and contain contact information. They could be then contacted and asked about the status of their abandoned entries.
If such a process existed and was publicly announced in the PyPi documentation, then there would be less work with this kind of maintenance, and no animosity in case of a needed entry being removed -- people would know what to expect.
I think there should be a PEP regulating the removal and the "taking over" process for packages. Your considerations make sense to me there. ASFAIK Perl has such policies a decade or so. Probably makes sense to use their provisions as a blue print. Such a PEP should contain a list of projects that are to be removed retro-actively if they don't comply within 6 months or so. I think the barrier shouldn't be too high, a valid email address and/or release activity are a good minimum. And it should be a short PEP :) cheers, holger
Thank you for all the good work on PyPi,
-- Radomir Dopieralski, http://sheep.art.pl _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig