Pypi name taken, advice

Packaging
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Story:

I’ve been maintaining a project on github for a couple of years now. It’s been a big learning project for me, not just with the code of the project itself but with python in general and working with github. I’ve had users suggest putting it on pypi so it can be installed via pip, which I thought was a good idea, I just needed to spend the time to fully understand what I was doing before uploading it. I played around with the pypi sandbox for a bit to get my feet wet but never got around to committing to this.

Advice needed:

In the meantime, a user had forked my repo, then took my project name on pypi for their fork. I’m trying to work this out privately, I don’t know if we’ll be able to come to terms on this, we’ll see.

Anyone have any thoughts on the situation? It seems like a jerk move to take a project name for your own fork but maybe I’m crazy, I don’t know the etiquette here. If this can’t be worked out, is there anything I can do? Should I be doing anything, or would you consider this a case of “you snooze you lose”?

Thanks for any advice

2 Likes
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Please file an issue at GitHub - pypi/support: Issue tracker for support requests related to using https://pypi.org if it gets to this point.

2 Likes
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Don’t forget that the distribution name (the name you give to pip install) doesn’t necessarily have to be the same as the package name(s) (the name you give to import). Example:

pip install tensorflow-gpu scikit-learn

import tensorflow as tf, sklearn
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Hmm, didn’t think about the names not having to be the same. So knowing that, would I be the a-hole in forcing the issue? Or would the “right” thing to do is just move on and come up with a new/similar name for the project on pypi?

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If another package on PyPI has your name (your’s is the master repo), then there will be endless confusion about which version is the one from you.

If you are unable to get the name back, consider changing the name of your package to avoid that future confusion.

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There’s a good chance that whoever uploaded the conflicting package now depends on it, so changing it for yours would break their system

Read more at: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0541/

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That is definitely the case Laurie.

Ethan, changing the name had occurred to me, though I’d hate to inflict that pain on all of the current users because of one.

This is kind of an annoying mess that I didn’t want to be in, it’s a valuable lesson to learn I suppose.

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They probably do, but they shouldn’t have taken the name of his project as their own…

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I would only go that route if PyPI Support can’t get it sorted out for you.

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Ahh, I hadn’t read the original post properly. I had assumed this was a completely different project with no association to the one Jeff maintains.

Hopefuly this can be resolved amicably. This seems like the kind of thing that could become a drama. I guess that’s why we have rules

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As this is a fork of the original, the ideal resolution would be to rejoin the projects in the next version.

If the goals of the package are no longer aligned, then the “forker” should not have kept the same name :-(.

Also, yes, there is at least one user that’s relying on the PyPi package, but maybe not more than a few – that would impact the resolution here. The barrier to entry to putting something on PyPi is pretty low, and it’s much easier than any other way to distribute your code, even if only to yourself (other machines, CIs, etc).