claim abandoned package linkchecker

[anarcat]

Hi!

The linkchecker package has been abandoned by its author (@wummel) for years. The last release on PyPI dates from 2014 and the last commit dates from June 2016, over a year ago.

Because of this, the community has stepped up to create a friendly fork to bring the project back to life. The "linkcheck" organization was created on Github for that purpose (because the "linkchecker" namespace was already taken by an unrelated user) and eventually the linkchecker organization was reclaimed as well (see linkchecker/linkchecker-old.github.io#2). New releases are being made in a new community-maintained project.

A full history of the discussions and various attempts at contacting the maintainer are well documented in wummel/linkchecker#686.

We would like to get back access to the PyPI "linkchecker" namespace/repository. I first posted this on the Sourceforge tracker as this was the only documented process i could find then. But since, I was told that some requests are made here as well, so I'm trying my luck here as well.

I believe linkchecker falls within the scope of abandoned projects as defined by PEP-0541:

• owner not reachable (see Reachability above);
• no releases within the past twelve months; and
• no activity from the owner on the project's home page (or no home page listed).

We wish to continue maintenance of the project, again as per PEP-0541 the following applies:

• the project has been determined abandoned by the rules described above;
• the candidate is able to demonstrate own failed attempts to contact the existing owner; (tried to reach by private email, issue queue, multiple parties, documented in in new organisation to welcome maintainers wummel/linkchecker#686)
• the candidate is able to demonstrate improvements made on the candidate's own fork of the project; (we made one release since the fork and are consistently reviewing and merging pull requests)
• the candidate is able to demonstrate why a fork under a different name is not an acceptable workaround; and (see below)
• the maintainers of the Package Index don't have any additional reservations.

Regarding the second to last criteria, we could use the linkcheck namespace (and indeed we have done that for the GitHub orga for a while) but that would mean renaming the whole package, something we'd like to avoid, as this is a friendly fork. Furthermore, "linkcheck" conflicts with other similar tools that already exist. Finally, we'd like to keep an upgrade path for all the users who have linkchecker installed.

My username on PyPI is anarcat and the other members of the organization are documented here:

https://github.com/orgs/linkchecker/people

Thank you for your consideration.

[jamadden]

Thanks for your detailed and well researched report. I can’t take any action on it, but I can and have added labels to help bring it to the attention of those that can.

[anarcat]

ping! is there anything someone can do here? (thanks @jamadden for the label updates)

[anarcat]

ping?

[jamadden]

PEP 541 was accepted yesterday so that's definitely the path to follow.

[anarcat]

@jamadden is there anything I can do to bring this issue forward? anything missing from my submission?

thanks for the update!

[jamadden]

It's in the hands of the "maintainers of the Package Index" now (e.g., @ewdurbin). I suspect they are probably quite busy working on Warehouse at the moment as it's scheduled to go live in relatively short order.

FWIW, it looks to me like the criteria have been met on your side of things. I think now the maintainers have to try contacting the project owner.

[anarcat]

it does look like things are somewhat moving here... in pypi/warehouse#1506 there's talk about how this process will work in the future and in pypi/warehouse#3369 there's a discussion to empty this issue queue completely, so there's hope!

i've renamed the issue title to follow the other issues here, and i've changed the summary to reflect that we were able to finally regain ownership of the linkchecker organization on GitHub as well. PyPI is our only blocker to finalize the (friendly) fork, so hopefully this will get unblocked soon. :)

[brainwane]

@anarcat , I'm sorry for the wait.

This may be redundant since you are aware of #3369, but just in case you are not:

We have archived this repository since it's about the legacy PyPI codebase. There's a new support ticket queue. Since you are still interested in this request, please re-open your issue there so we can follow up.

We're working on implementing PEP 541 with a new process -- you can subscribe to pypi/warehouse#1506 to follow our progress. Once we do that, we'll start working through all the requests for package transfers within https://github.com/pypa/pypi-support/ .

Until then, unfortunately, all I can advise you to do is wait. My apologies.