[Distutils] Parked Names in PyPI under user rodmena

[Nick Coghlan]

On 22 April 2016 at 09:40, Ionel Cristian Mărieș <contact at ionelmc.ro> wrote:

>
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 1:14 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov>
> wrote:
>
>> If that author were to suddenly decide to publish some malware under that
>> name -- it would get a  lot of traffic!
>
>
> ​That's the problem with badly chosen names.​ I mean, what do you expect
> when you give a name taken 3 years ago to your project?
>
> Mypy is a poor name anyway, it's hard/ambiguous to spell and write [1],
> and doesn't tell anything about functionality.
>
> This is hard to understand, especially if you don't know any other
> language than English, but for non-native English speakers these things
> really matter.
>

FWIW, mypy isn't great as a name for English speakers either - I always
have to remind myself that it has nothing to do with Mython [1].

Naming projects in general is hard though, especially for relatively arcane
tasks like typechecking annotated Python code.

Perhaps it would be worth having a "Choosing a name" section in
https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/distributing/ similar to the
"Choosing a version" one, where we provided some pragmatic suggestions on
things to check for once you have a name you're considering, like:

1. Is the name already claimed on PyPI?
2. What comes up in a web search for that name?
3. What comes up if you qualify the search with "python" as a second
keyword?

Those 3 cursory checks will find most potential name conflicts before
someone commits themselves to a particular one.

Cheers,
Nick.

[1] http://mython.org/

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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