Remove mention of abandoned project Flask-Uploads from docs

[jacobsvante]

I would love to see this project updated, but it seems to have been abandoned by its creator. Still doesn't support Python 3 and hasn't given any love to PyPI for almost 4 years. It seems impossible to get in contact with the creator. This PR removes the reference of Flask-Uploads from the docs. Another option would be to have a NOTE about it being abandoned. I think it also makes sense to remove it from the Flask extensions list (where's the repo for that?)

Here's a 2 year old ticket on Bitbucket that fixes Python 3 support. No reply what-so-ever from @leafstorm. His last public activity on Bitbucket was three years ago.

I'll e-mail him with a reference to this ticket to see if we can get a reply. Perhaps with this ticket we can get the project owner's attention.

The best alternative would of course be to get development going on the project again, perhaps by adding more contributors to the project. Let me know how you feel about all of this. 😊

[untitaker]

Hello @jmagnusson I'd prefer a solution which gives Flask-Uploads a new maintainer. It would be a long time before this PR would make it into a stable release, so I'm not sure if it's even useful as a temporary solution.

[jacobsvante]

@untitaker I agree, if we can get hold of him and solve it that way that would be great.

[untitaker]

That guy seems to be fairly active on his Twitter site, pinged him there: https://twitter.com/untitaker/status/608677168269398016

[jacobsvante]

That's great!

[leafstorm]

Yeah, all my Flask extensions are pretty much abandoned. I wrote them for fun back in high school when I had loads of free time, and now that I have a full-time non-programming job, maintaining extensions for a framework that I don't really use anymore is pretty low on my priority list.

If someone would like to fork my extensions and start maintaining them again, I would be more than happy to turn over the PyPI admin rights.

[jacobsvante]

I know this feeling...
Perhaps @mattupstate would be willing? Considering that he wrote the Python 3 pull request mentioned above. (Which works great btw!)

I could do it, but I'm afraid I might not give it the love it deserves in the long run.

[jeffwidman]

I'd be up for maintaining Flask-Uploads. @leafstorm I dropped you an email.

[Jaza]

I don't think that removing Flask-Uploads from the docs is warranted, even if it doesn't get a new maintainer soon (which it looks like it will, @jeffwidman good on you for putting your hand up):

• Despite it having received no love in years, it actually still works "pretty well" (for a few projects of mine, at least... with Flask 0.10 and Python 2.7)
• It handles a very common use case
• What's the alternative?

Perhaps just add a note to the docs, indicating that it hasn't been maintained for a long time, and / or that it's in the process of receiving a new maintainer.

[jeffwidman]

FWIW, I've emailed @leafstorm several times and haven't heard a thing back.

[leafstorm]

Sorry, @jeffwidman. I'm staying pretty busy with work, and my downtime is not usually the time I have an unread email from you in my inbox. :-P

If you create a GitHub fork and get everything ready for a release, send me an email or mention me on GitHub and I can give you release access on PyPI. I'll also sign off on a PR to the Flask Web site changing the Flask-Uploads entry to have your name as the maintainer - the file you'll need to change is https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask-website/blob/master/flask_website/listings/extensions.py.

Besides the PyPI admin rights and recognition as maintainer by @mitsuhiko, I don't think there's anything else I have that you would need in order to get set up. But let me know if anything I have control over is blocking you from taking over.

And if anyone's interested in maintaining Flask-CouchDB, Flask-Login, Flask-Themes, or Flask-XML-RPC, the same offer applies.

[justanr]

@Jaza Not to toot my own horn, but I've been working on a library that does most of what uploads does and then some.

https://github.com/justanr/Flask-Transfer

[Jaza]

@justanr No problem - since you're doing it, I might as well toot my horn too - not exactly a replacement for Flask-Uploads, but I've written some libraries for uploading to an S3 bucket. Example of how to use these packages together is here:

https://github.com/Jaza/flask-s3-save-example

[Jdash99]

Guys, Do we have a new maintainer of flask-upload?

[jeffwidman]

@Jdash99 thanks for the reminder.

I just did a test migration of the code/issues over to Github.

While everything went relatively smoothly, for simplicity I think a migration will be a little cleaner if I first deal with the backlog of tasks in the Bitbucket repo--merge the PRs, close out the issues fixed by the PRs, etc. That way there's no issues with folks who did the hard work on PRs not being credited, etc... Once that's done, I'll migrate it over to Github, and then add a few niceties like Travis, fix python 3 compatibility, etc.

@leafstorm can you give me admin access on the bitbucket repo? My bitbucket username is 'jeffwidman': https://bitbucket.com/leafstorm/flask-uploads/admin/access

Once I migrate to Github I will update the BB repo with links to the Github repo, similar to the way pytest handled their migration.

[leafstorm]

@jeffwidman Sure - thanks for doing the preliminaries!

[jeffwidman]

Alright, cleaned out the old PRs and some of the issues, and then migrated to https://github.com/jeffwidman/flask-uploads

@leafstorm can you also give me pypi access rights? I'm 'jeffwidman' there too.

Need to fix a few things before I feel comfortable pushing a new release with the changes, but I think we're on the right track and rather get all the access transferred now so I'm not waiting for it later...

[jeffwidman]

Quick update:
I fixed the issue that broke Python 3 compatibility. Someone tried it on Python 3 and confirmed it's working perfectly.

I've also swapped from using Flask modules (which Flask deprecated quite a while ago) to operating as a normal Flask extension using blueprints. @mattupstate did a lot of the heavy lifting there in a pull request back in 2013 that just hadn't been merged in, and I tidied up a few last bits.

At this point, I think everything is ready for a new release to be cut, I'm just waiting on commit rights to Pypi.

For now, you can install directly from github using Pip:

pip install git+https://git@github.com/jeffwidman/flask-uploads.git

[leafstorm]

@jeffwidman Thanks for putting in the hard work! The Travis testing is beautiful.

...This is kind of awkward, but I don't appear to have admin rights to the package on PyPI anymore. I think @maxcountryman may need to grant you access.

[jeffwidman]

Thanks for the kind words.

Last night I emailed @maxcountryman and @rduplain when I noticed they were collaborators on the Bitbucket repo, linking to this thread and asking if they wanted to be collaborators on the new repo. I was a bit surprised, as I had no idea anyone other than you were a collaborator until you gave me access to the BB repo. Ron said he was too busy, which is understandable.

Max replied this morning basically saying thanks for the hard work but he had commit rights on PyPI and he isn't willing to transfer them. Instead since there was so much interest he was planning to migrate the project to his own github repo and suggested I contribute the fixes there.

He said he wished I'd tried to contact him sooner, which made no sense because multiple people have left comments on that bitbucket repo over the past few years asking if it was abandoned, with no reply. There was also that beautiful pull request from @mattupstate modernizing things that sat ignored. That's why we're even discussing this issue in the first place.

I don't mind contributing to other people's projects, and I'm not trying to stir up drama here, but it does leave a bad taste in my mouth that I spent the better portion of a day fixing stuff up only to have a collaborator who's been absent from the project for years decide he's going to take control by strong arming PyPI rights.

I'd be curious to hear Max expound on his thinking more here, maybe I'm just misunderstanding something.

[leafstorm]

FWIW, I'm sorry about the delay in getting the changes integrated and released. I didn't even remember that I'd relinquished my PyPI access. (I also don't remember who's maintaining Flask-CouchDB, -Themes, or -XML-RPC right now...I should probably check on that. I still at least have PyPI ownership of the latter three.)

I'd also like to hear @maxcountryman's plans for the project - since Jeff has already done the work of migrating it over to GitHub and merging a bunch of PR's, I don't think it makes sense to migrate from scratch to his account at this point. Either Jeff could transfer the repo to Max, Max could transfer the PyPI admin rights to Jeff, or Max and Jeff could share the admin rights to the repo and PyPI.

[jeffwidman]

No worries @leafstorm. I appreciate you being willing to let others continue with the project.

I'm still confused why someone who isn't the project repo owner, never made any commits to the project, or commented on any issues decides he's unwilling to transfer Pypi rights to the project, despite completely ignoring the project for years.

What am I missing here?

[davidism]

We can't control the ownership of PyPI names. Since it seems to have a maintainer for now, I'm closing this, although discussion can continue. @maxcountryman please consider working with @jeffwidman either by adding him as a maintainer or getting his work merged in for a new release.

[maxcountryman]

Perhaps Jeff would like to share with everyone the fact that he approached me some months ago asking if I was still maintaining the project and wondered if I would be willing to introduce some new updates. When I said yes, he apparently decided that was not the answer he was looking for (I guess he was hoping I would say no and give the project to him) and decided to go on a holy mission to make the project his. I have to say, we as a community should not tolerate this kind of nonsense.

Shall we all just engage in a coup d'é·tat every time a project maintainer doesn't hand us the reigns? Surely not.

I don't have the time or interest to participate in this kind of puerile bullshit. Jeff, grow up man, I don't know what your problem is, but you have no right to misrepresent the situation and lie about what actually happened--I responded to your inquiries, I answered your questions, you decided you could go over my head and get permission from Matthew when I didn't give you the answers you wanted to hear.

If the community wants to see updates to the project, I've already cleaned it up quite a bit and published a new release some weeks ago--this includes unreleased work from the BitBucket repo. I'm happy to continue to do so. However, I'm not happy to reward Jeff's behavior by handing it over to him--I don't think that sets a good precedent for the community.

Finally, I'm busy, this kind of nonsense is distracting and a massive waste of everyone's time. I'd appreciate it if I not be contacted again about this--please don't mention me in this thread. Thanks for your understanding! 😄

[jeffwidman]

I know this is old, but stumbled across it googling something else.

It calls my integrity into question, so thought I should respond.

Perhaps Jeff would like to share with everyone the fact that he approached me some months ago asking if I was still maintaining the project and wondered if I would be willing to introduce some new updates

I have no idea what he's talking about--I never emailed him months before and had no clue he was even involved with the project until after @leafstorm (project owner) said he was transferring maintenance to me and I'd gone in and cleaned up a bunch of old issues/PRs.

Then I noticed Max was a collaborator on BitBucket--up to that point, I had no idea he was involved in the project, as he had no public activity of any kind on the repo, no commits, no issue comments, etc. I assumed he had no interest in the project, but just in case I emailed him saying "Hey, I'm taking over maintenance since leafstorm doesn't have time, I just noticed you're listed as a collaborator on BitBucket, do you still want to help with the project?" (as documented here).

At this point, it's clear there's a disagreement and we have both given our depiction of events (see also the comment history further up this thread). I don't plan to comment further on this thread.