[Distutils] Name arbitration on PyPI (was: The mypy package)

[Ian Cordasco]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 4:16 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> You've made a strong case, and this is probably not where PyPi should go --
> but it would hardly be a disaster:
>
>>
>> The idea of expiring out names has been brought up recently to resolve an
>> issue of two packages, one popular and large; another someone's weekend
>> project.
>
>
> The issue here is not that it's a weekend project, but that it may be an
> abandoned project. I don't think anyone suggest that we should have a
> popularity or quality test to see who gets to trump whom with name
> allocation -- I sure didn't.
>
> Which is quite relevant to below:
>
>>
>> 1.  PyYAML is a package that would be de-registered in such a scheme.  It
>> is a highly used, extremely popular, package that unserializes text into
>> arbitrary python objects.  It is a trusted package... and one that hasn't
>> been active in ages.
>
>
> and you don't think ANYONE would be willing to take on the miniscule amount
> of work to maintain the name? Plus there would be any number of other
> schemes for determining whether a project name is abandoned.

I have in fact offered but the author refuses to accept help from
anyone. They're also the author of the C library (libyaml) and they do
not maintain that either. It's actually quite frustrating as someone
who wants to fix some of the numerous bugs in the library + improve it
and add support for YAML 1.2 which is years old at this point.

>>
>> 2. the package tooling already assumes that names will always point to
>> one, and only one package.  ever.  until the heat death of the universe or
>> the death of the language whichever is first.
>
>
> IIUC, the current scheme allows for a name to be "taken over" by a new
> package if the original author so desires -- i.e. if the current owner of
> the mypy name was happy to relinquish it, then "pip install mypy" would get
> users something totally different 6 months from now. So no -- we don't
> currently guarantee anything about future use of names. Other that that the
> original author can do whatever they want with it.
>
>> 3. Who in the PSF really wants that bureaucratic nightmare of arbitrating
>> cases when this inevitably messes up, be this system manual or automatic?
>
>
> I think bureaucratic nightmare is pretty hyperbolic, but yes, there would be
> some overhead, for sure. And given that no one has the time and motivation
> to even maintain PyPi at this point -- this will probably kill the idea
> altogether.
>
>
>> To the specifics of the mypy-lang package that brought this up... It's
>> like naming your company "Yahoo", and getting upset that yahoo.com is
>> getting a bump in traffic because of your popularity.
>
>
> Again - this is not about minor weekend projects not be "important". It's
> about potential abandonware -- with domain registration, "Yahoo" can offer
> to buy the domain from the current holder, or, if the current owner has
> abandoned it, it will go into the public pool again when they stop paying to
> maintain the registration.
>
> -CHB
>
>
> --
>
> Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
> Oceanographer
>
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>
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