In order to claim a package as being abandoned it should undergo a formal process that includes: * Placement on a PUBLIC list of packages under review for a grace period to be determined by this discussion * Formal attempts via email and social media (twitter, github, et al) to contact the maintainer. * Investigation of the claimant for the rights to the package. The parties attempting to claim a package may not be the best representatives of the community behind that package, or the Python community in general. Why? * Non-reply does not equal consent. * Access to a commonly (or uncommonly) used package poses security and reliability issues. Why: Scenario 1: I could claim ownership of the redis package, providing a certain-to-fail email for the maintainers of PyPI to investigate? Right now the process leads me to think I would succeed in gaining access. If successful, I would gain complete access to a package used by hundreds of projects for persistence storage. Scenario 2: I could claim ownership of the redis package, while Andy McCurdy (maintainer) was on vacation for two weeks, or sabbatical for six weeks. Again, I would gain access because under the current system non-reply equals consent. Reference: In ticket #407 (https://sourceforge.net/p/pypi/support-requests/407/) someone who does not appear to be vetted managed to gain control of the (arguably) abandoned but still extremely popular django-registration on PyPI. They run one of several HUNDRED forks of django-registration, one that is arguably not the most commonly used. My concern is that as django-registration is the leading package for handling system registration for Python's most popular web framework, handing it over without a full investigation of not just the current maintainer but also the candidate maintainer is risky. Regards, Daniel Greenfeld pydanny@gmail.com