How can we petition for removal of a defunct/unmaintained project in pypi?

Packaging
1

Is there a way to petition removal of a project under pypi? We have an active project (badfish - see: GitHub - redhat-performance/badfish: Vendor-agnostic tool for managing bare-metal systems via the Redfish API ) which we would like to have included in Fedora. However, there is a name clash with what appears to be a defunct/unmaintained project ( badfish · PyPI ) which seems to have had no commits for 9 years. Please find the github link to the defunct badfish in the pypi link above (I cannot link it since I’m limited to 2 links in a post as a new user).

Thank you for your consideration
Kambiz

2

See PEP 541. It’s normally best to first try to contact the person who owns the project; have you already done this?

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3

@MegaIng thank you for your reply. We have not yet tried that route, though we will attempt that. I will followup here if we don’t get a response.

4

Why does the name clash affect being included in Fedora?

5

I don’t understand it either but apparently it’s an issue with Fedora packaging.

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6

And actually, I don’t want to be a pest, but why do you think that the project is defunct? Yes, it had no update for nine years, but I don’t think there is anywhere the duty to continually commit to a repository to be allowed to stay at PyPI. I know it is awful, but you have unfortunately picked a wrong name for your project and you should reconsider renaming … names on PyPI are strictly on the first comes first served basis.

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7

This isn’t really true, as outlined in PEP 541. You need to also be actively using the name or the package needs to be used by others, otherwise you can lose your package name.

8

PEP541 makes it harder than that to lose your package name. Simply being “reachable” is enough for your project to be considered “active”.

(And PEP541 is explicit that index maintainers will not be arbiters in such cases.)

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Hi Folks, we’ve reached out to the old owner of the defunct project and they agreed to let us take the name. Here is an email exchange. They were going to look into how they can release the name but maybe this is enough for Pypi maintainers to simply do it for us?

badfish-name-pypi
badfish-name-pypi1798×1022 95.5 KB

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“pypi maintainer” time is a limit resources - ideally they don’t get involved at all and you guys just figure it out.

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11

Can they not just add you as maintainers to the project and then you can remove them afterwards?

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12

Can they not just add you as maintainers to the project and then you can remove them afterwards?

I don’t know, we’ll reach out to them again. From what I can gather they are very time-limited and the project is definitely not active anymore but they are fine letting us have the name. I agree having the old project maintainer perform either a name change, removal or adding us as maintainers to do the same would be ideal I just don’t know how responsive they are beyond “Yes, you can have the name and let me look into how to give it to you” reply.

Thanks for all the suggestions, our badfish goes back to 2018 and is heavily used including as a dependency in several other projects so it isn’t like we just picked the name and it was taken, it was only when we started the Fedora packaging submission did we notice it was reserved. We primarily had packaged it in RPM via COPR and containers.

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Side note: You’ll want them to add you as owners of the project, not maintainers.

1 Like
14

I don’t have any particular stake in this one, but it doesn’t seem very clean to have a project retain its old history but transition to a completely new project with new owners. I see this one had a short history with only a few releases, but it still seems like it could be confusing. Would another option be to rename the old project according to some convention (e.g. foo → foo_abandoned)?

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15

If someone is promoted to owner can they rename the project namespace or is that an admin action?

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Owners cannot rename PyPI projects. Admins might be able to, but I doubt they’d be willing to.

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There’s no clean solution for taking over a project name. Fundamentally, you are providing something new and unrelated under sn existing name.

IMHO renaming the old project would only be beneficial if it had a sizable and active user base. But that would prevent name transfer in the first place.

In the present case, it‘s likely the best option to yank the existing releases and add a note to the PyPI page that the project name has been repurposed, I.e. be transparent what was done, but prevent accidental use of the old packages.

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