[Distutils] How can we handle package renaming?

[Richard Jones]

I occasionally receive requests from package maintainers asking to
have their PyPI package renamed (for example, renaming
"eyepea_monitoring_agent" to "tanto"). The only response I have at the
moment is to tell them to release their package under both the new and
old names in parallel, and promote only the new name, as the PyPI name
must match the name defined in setup.py.

I'd like to open up discussion to ideas about how to handle this better.

Somewhat related would be *perhaps* allowing a package named "Pillow"
to be installed when a requirement requests "PIL" via some kind of
aliasing mechanism.


     Richard