Hi Radomir, On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 12:57 +0200, Radomir Dopieralski wrote: > Hello, > > is there a defined process for removing useless entries from PyPi? > > I was looking for a name for a new project, and as a part of that, I searched > on the Python Package Index to see if the names I came up with are not taken > already. I stumbled upon this: > > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fun/1.0.0 > > Please note that there is absolutely no information about this entry. There > is no way to contact the author and ask him if he would be willing to give > up that name, no website, not even a license or description. If you look into > the uploaded source code, you will see that it's just a "hello world" program. > > That's not a problem for me, I just picked a different name for my package. > Even if I wanted to use that name, I could add a prefix or suffix to it, to > make > it unique. But then I looked through the list of the entires and checked the > ones that had no description or their description was suspicious. Just with > the > letter A I got: > > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/42/0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Aaronyoungnester/1.4.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ABC/0.0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/abhi/2.0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/acme.sql/0.0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/affix/1.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/agg2567/1.1.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/agg2567/1.1.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/airstream/0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ajl_nester/1.1.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/akali/1.3.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/alexis/0.1 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/amoi/.lol. > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/aodag3/1.0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/arch/0.0.1 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/arounded/0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/AthleteClass/1.0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelist/1.1.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelist_jw/1.0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/athletelistlogan/1.3.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/atool/1.0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/awesomeness/0.0.1 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/aws-cli/0.0 > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ayame/0.0 > > All of those entries share some properties: > > * no author and no way to contact the author > * no website, website offline or obviously not related (like google.com) > * no description or meaningless description > * no download url or uploaded code, or the code that is uploaded is just > a "hello world" or similar exercise > * no license > > I think that all those properties, taken together, in practice mean that the > particular entry is completely useless both to the Python community and to its > author -- possibly being just an abandoned test. I also think that there > should > be a defined process for requesting of removal of such entries -- so that an > actually useful project can take their place. > > I understand that some of those entries are placeholders for projects that are > actively being worked upon, just not much is disclosed yet. In that case, they > could at least have an author contact information, a link to the repository or > an "development status: in planning" trove classifier. Those project would be > left alone. > > An additional check that could be done on the PyPi side is whether the same > PuPi user has also some other entries that are perhaps more meaningful and > contain contact information. They could be then contacted and asked about the > status of their abandoned entries. > > If such a process existed and was publicly announced in the PyPi > documentation, > then there would be less work with this kind of maintenance, and no animosity > in case of a needed entry being removed -- people would know what to expect.
I think there should be a PEP regulating the removal and the "taking over" process for packages. Your considerations make sense to me there. ASFAIK Perl has such policies a decade or so. Probably makes sense to use their provisions as a blue print. Such a PEP should contain a list of projects that are to be removed retro-actively if they don't comply within 6 months or so. I think the barrier shouldn't be too high, a valid email address and/or release activity are a good minimum. And it should be a short PEP :) cheers, holger > > Thank you for all the good work on PyPi, > > -- > Radomir Dopieralski, http://sheep.art.pl > _______________________________________________ > Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig > _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
