[Distutils] Outdated packages on pypi

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016, at 01:25 AM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> Off the top of my head I can only really think of PIL, and *maybe*
> suds. Unless there’s a lot of these maybe all we really need is a
> policy for when administrators can/will edit the page to direct people
> towards a different project or a way to add an admin message directing
> people to another project.
 
Proposal: let's put some such manual intervention policy in place for now. Apply it for PIL to point to Pillow, and query the active suds forks to see if there's a generally agreed successor.
 
If this works well, great! If  the admins are flooded with 'successor
requests', then we can come back to question of an automated mechanism.
If there are too many abandoned packages with competing successors,
that's a trickier problem to solve, but at least we'd be considering it
with more information.
 
As further examples: pydot, pexpect and python-modernize have all been
unmaintained, leading to forks springing up. In all three cases, some of
the forkers eventually coordinated to contact the original maintainer,
get upload rights, and make new releases with the original name. It
would certainly have been nice if that could have happened sooner in
each case, but I doubt that any technical fix would have made a big
difference.
 
Thomas
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