I perhaps wouldn’t be so quick to judge. Could you clarify what “agreed standards” you are referring to? I’m not aware of any normative standard agreed and implemented between downstream repackagers that ensures every package matches their name on PyPI; this simply isn’t easily possible, as they pretty much all cover a much wider scope than PyPI, with packages from multiple languages outside of PyPI’s namespace (e.g. R, JS, binaries, etc). Of those, Conda has perhaps the least variance from the PyPI name, at least after PEP 503 normalization, as far as I’m aware.
In any case, it appears I was at least somewhat mistaken, as I can’t seem to find any of the mismatches I thought I recalled from the past, even with the python-
prefix and similar. It seems that had to do with some combination of not accounting for PEP 503 normalization (which I wasn’t aware of back in the day), better aliasing and package name standardization, me actually thinking of the difference between the import package and distribution package name, and simple imperfect memory.
I’m sure there still are some edge cases in the PyPI → Conda direction due to collisions between namespaces and such, but there’s no way around that. It appears much less common than the import package/distribution package name mismatch on PyPI, where I can think of a bunch of examples off the top of my head (scikit-learn, dateutil, netcdf, etc).
That seems like a rather broad negative generalization based on one person saying that a small proportion of package names don’t match exactly, mostly for good reason (collisions, etc). Even if we assume what I said previously was correct, couldn’t you say the same of every other repackager, given (AFAIK) most Linux distros exhibit at least some variance from PyPA package names in some cases? Furthermore, it’s not one monolithic entity setting those names, its individual community volunteer maintainers, which seem to have a much better track record than upstream projects using distribution package names that match that of their import package, most for not nearly as good a reason.
Conda packages predated PEP 503 and Metadata 2.1 by many years, though their normalization is in practice identical in nearly all cases. And there’s certainly no standardization on import package vs distribution package naming, even to the present day. Perhaps there is some other standard you’re referring to?