[Distutils] Create formal process for claiming 'abandoned' packages

[Nick Coghlan]

On 23 Sep 2014 00:19, "Antoine Pitrou" <antoine at python.org> wrote:
>
> Donald Stufft <donald <at> stufft.io> writes:
> >
> > PyPI inherinently has complete control over who owns what name on PyPI.
>
> Political authority does not derive from technical control, though.
>
> > As Toshio said that are situations where it makes *obvious* sense to
transfer
> > ownership of a project. Using Django as an pretty good example here,
There are
> > four people able to make releases there, until fairly recently there
were only
> > two if I recall. I don't think anyone would be against PyPI transfering
> > ownership of Django to another active core developer of Django in the
event
> > that all of the people with permissions on PyPI were gone in some
fashion.
>
> Assuming the remaining Django core developers agree on it, then, yes, that
> can make sense. That's because they are the primary authors of the project
> (even though they might not have been listed as such on PyPI).
>
> The case people are worried about is whether someone who is not part of
the
> original project author(s) or maintainer(s) can get assigned the PyPI
project.
> In that case people should use one of the forks; there's no reason for
PyPI
> to crown a successor.

That's why I consider it important to get the original project's issue
tracker involved in the transfer process. I'd also be OK with a process
that required an affirmative "Yes" from the project community, defaulting
to "No transfer" in the case of a lack of response.

Transfers are most needed for highly active projects where a fork could
have a lot of ripple effects. I think it's reasonable to interpret "nobody
cared enough to say yes or no" as "nobody cares enough for a transfer to be
needed - just fork it rather than claiming the name".

Regards,
Nick.
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