On 13Jul2016 1252, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
The primary thing would be to have a banner on the page and a warning
from `pip install´. Those of us close to the heart of the Python
community already have various ways of reading the tea leaves to know
that things are likely to be unmaintained or bitrotting; the main
purpose of such a feature would be to have an automated way for people
who /don't/ personally know all the prominent package authors and see
them at conferences and meetups all the time to get this information.
For example: nobody should be using PIL, they should be using pillow.
Yet there's no way for a new user to figure this out by just looking
at https://pypi.io/project/PIL/ :).
I think that the adjudication process for stealing a name from an
existing owner is something that still bears discussion, but separately.
Whatever that process is, you'd have to go through it fully after a
package becomes thusly "abandoned", and for the reasons you cite, it
absolutely should not be automated. Perhaps it shouldn't even be the
way to deal with it - maybe the most you should be able to do in this
case is to expand the "this is unmaintained" warning with a pointer to a
different replacement name.
I like this. Maybe if a maintainer doesn't trigger the switch/publish
anything for a year, a banner appears on the page with a publicly
editable (votable?) list of alternative packages - thinking something
similar to a reviews system with an "I found this review helpful" button.
Possibly such user-contributed content would be valuable anyway, but the
"probably abandoned" state just moves it to the top of the page instead
of the bottom.
Cheers,
Steve
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