Why do PEP 561 and typeshed naming conventions conflict?

Typing
1

Here’s something I noticed a while ago that’s puzzled me ever since. For stub-only packages published as a separate distribution/project from the runtime package, there’s two things that need to indicate that relationship: the installed package’s name and the distribution’s name.

  • PEP 561 standardizes the package name as pkgname-stubs.

  • For dist name, I guess there’s no equivalent “official” standard, but typeshed uses types-distname for the stub projects it publishes. I’ve seen other choices, like some mypy-distname.

I know there’s no technical requirement for package and dist names to match, but I think it’s generally recommended unless there’s a reason not, and in this case it seems like it would be more intuitive. Is the disagreement just an accident?

2

Typeshed chose this convention in the anticipation that PyPI would add namespace support and typeshed could reserve the types namespace. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

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3

We recently updated the spec to attempt to clarify this: Distributing type information — typing documentation

Some more discussion at:

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Thank you both for your explanations; that makes sense. I suppose you’re right that it’s difficult to change now. I missed the discussion thread about this and that line in the docs, sorry for making you answer again :sweat_smile:

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