Hi all.

TL;DR version: I think

* an option to enroll in automatic ownership transfer
* an option to promote Request for Adoption
* don't transfer unless there are no releases on the index

will be reasonable to me.

On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Richard Jones <rich...@python.org> wrote:

>
> In light of this specific case, I have an additional change that I think
> I'll implement to attempt to prevent it again: In the instances where the
> current owner is unresponsive to my attempts to contact them, *and* the
> project has releases in the index, I will not transfer ownership. In the
> cases where no releases have been made I will continue to transfer
> ownership.
>
>
I believe this is the best solution, and frankly, people in the OSS world
has been forking all these years
should someone disagree with the upstream or just believe they are better
off with the fork. I am not
a lawyer, but one has to look at any legal issue with ownership transfer. I
am not trying to scare
anyone, but the way I see ownership transfer (or even modifying the index
on behalf of me) is the same
as asking Twitter or Github to grant me a username simply because the
account has zero activity.

Between transferring ownership automatically after N trials and the above,
I choose the above.
Note not everyone is on Github, twitter. Email, er, email send/receive can
go wrong.

As a somewhat extreme but not entirely rare example, Satoshi Nakamoto and
Bitcoin would
be an interesting argument. If Bitcoin was published as a package on PyPI,
should someone
just go and ask for transfer? We know this person shared his codes and the
person disappeared.
Is Bitcoin mission-critical? People downloaded the code, fork it and
started building a community
on their own. What I am illustrating here is that not everyone can be in
touch. There are people
who choose to remain anonymous, or away from popular social network.

Toshio Kuratomi <a.bad...@gmail.com> wrote:

> But there are
> also security concerns with letting a package bitrot on pypi.
>

Again, I think that people should simply fork. The best we can do is simply
prevent
the packages from being downloaded again. Basically, shield all the packages
from public. We preserve what people did and had. We can post a notice
so the public knows what is going on.

Surely it sucks to have to use a fork when Django or Requests are forked and
now everyone has to call it something different and rewrite their code.
But that's the beginning of a new chapter. The community has to be reformed.
It sucks but I think it is better in the long run. You don't have to argue
with the
original owner anymore in theory.

Last, I think it is reasonable to add Request for Adoption to PyPI.
Owners who feel obligated to step down can promote the intent over PyPI

John
_______________________________________________
Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig

Reply via email to