I’m not sure what happened, as I can’t seem to find any public mention of it on this thread, anywhere in the PyPI GitHub org, or searching on Google, but after checking again, it seems that despite the multiple serious concerns expressed by the community, rather discouraging comments from the maintainer and a general consensus against it, expressed on the linked thread, that particular continuation of nntplib was in fact handed the original, official name on PyPI after all.
While the potential harms in this particular case is relatively limited, given it the module is for a relatively niche, obsolescent (though still in-use) protocol, other PEP 594 modules like cgi that see vastly more extent use are a whole different story. Therefore, and to be consistent and fair to other such maintainers like @_david who’ve been polite, diplomatic and understanding, we really should openly discuss and decide on a coherent policy in collaboration with the PyPI admins as soon as practical, before this becomes a larger problem.
Therefore, I’ve opened a new thread to discuss this:
Also,
Actually, it seems folks have had enough of a potential problem to open a detailed thread to consider doing something about it (which was prompted by the concerns of a number of Python core devs), as there is a current thread discussing exactly this.
However, the potential problem they pose is much less than in the current situation, as they are generally owned by the core devs and other known and trusted maintainers who developed them, whose work was already accepted into Python’s standard library, rather than by whatever third party happened to express interested in the package first. Furthermore, they will be shadowed in any future Python version that has them in the stdlib and thus serve no future ongoing purpose, whereas particularly if there is significant community interest, these names may remain relevant for many years to come.