New project: compat-fork

I’d like to announce a new project: compat-fork · GitHub. It’s a home for fixing up projects on PyPI that need some minor touchups to keep working with newer versions of Python or other maintenance needs.

I started this project because I’ve encountered several situations where a library I was depending on somewhere stopped receiving updates (which is fine; maintainers are usually volunteers, and they are not obligated to keep working on projects). It’s often easy enough to get the package working on a newer Python release, but somebody needs to go in and make the necessary changes.

So I created a GitHub organization that can host such repos and provide some standard infrastructure and policies. The goal isn’t to do feature development on any of these packages, just the bare minimum to keep them working as the world moves on. You can read more in the org README.

If you are using a package that could use a compatibility fork, please let me know and we can talk about adding it to this organization. And if you’re interested in helping out with maintaining this project, let me know too—a project to guard against bitrot should really have more than one maintainer.

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Sounds useful!

A small suggestion: Could you add a link to the new PyPI packages in the modified Github readmes, and a link to the Github repo from the PyPI page?
For example to find compat-fork-diagrams · PyPI from GitHub - compat-fork/diagrams: 🎨 Diagram as Code for prototyping cloud system architectures so far requires reading the CI script I think, and finding the Github from the PyPI (the other way around) is seemingly impossible so far.

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What kind of packages are accepted?

  • Written in Python

Do you only accept pure Python packages?

How does this compare to Jazzband?

That’s a good idea, thanks for noticing that. I should add a link to the PyPI package to the README and update the project URLs in project metadata when I fork a project.

I would also accept packages that include native extensions; I’ll fix the wording.

It seems similar and maybe the efforts could be merged at some point, yes. However, Jazzband doesn’t seem as narrowly focused. I intentionally exclude feature development on packages to make sure the maintenance load doesn’t get too high.

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