Thank you for your response, Rob. In that case it is possible for ownership of the “emd” package to be transferred to me? There is no contact information for the current owner. How can I start this process? Thank you, Chathika Gunaratne Graduate Research Assistant, Complex Adaptive Systems Lab University of Central Florida, Room 314, Engineering II, 12800 Pegasus Dr., Orlando, FL 32816-2993 ________________________________ From: Robert Collins <robertc@robertcollins.net> Sent: Sunday, August 5, 2018 3:49:32 AM To: Chathika Gunaratne Cc: distutils-sig@python.org; lukasz@python.org; mmangoba@python.org Subject: Re: [Distutils] PEP 541 Regarding emd On 4 August 2018 at 03:34, Chathika Gunaratne <Chathika.Gunaratne@ucf.edu> wrote:

Dear Admin,

I am writing to you regarding the Package Index name emd. I am a PhD student at the University of Central Florida and for my dissertation, I have recently developed a Python software, Evolutionary Model Discovery, which I am assembling into a package, EMD. https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%...

However, I noticed that there is already a package named emd on pypi.org. This package seems abandoned with just one release in February 2012 and no contact information about the author, https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpypi.org%2F... .

I read about PEP 541 https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.python.... and was curious as to if it is still possible that I can acquire the package name EMD. I wanted to make sure of this before I went ahead with the name EMD for my package, please.

Generally speaking its not whether a package has been updated that matters, its whether the package is in use: if its published in debian/suse/fedora, if its getting downloads, then taking over the name is going to have negative consequences. That said, this has had 0 downloads per the bigtable statistics (0 for all recorded time) so in this case that seems unlikely. -Rob