PEP 541 Request: alpm

[dvzrv]

Project to be claimed

alpm: https://pypi.org/project/alpm

Your PyPI username

dvzrv: https://pypi.org/user/dvzrv

Reasons for the request

Hi! 👋

I would like to publish a new package under the name alpm.
The package emanates from the ALPM project (https://alpm.archlinux.page) which develops Rust crates for Arch Linux Package Management (and now would like to release Python bindings).
The project is part of the Arch Linux project.

Currently we are unable to do so, as the name appears to be "too similar":

Uploading alpm-0.1.0a0-cp310-abi3-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.whl (684.4KiB)
error: Failed to publish `dist/alpm-0.1.0a0-cp310-abi3-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.whl` to https://upload.pypi.org/legacy/
  Caused by: Upload failed with status code 400 Bad Request. Server says: 400 The name 'alpm' is too similar to an existing project. See https://pypi.org/help/#project-name for more information.

Similar projects are pyalpm (also part of the Arch Linux project, but bindings for the libalpm C library) and alpm-conf (a new project, in part based on our Rust crates, but external to the Arch Linux project).

It would be great if the alpm name was released, as it is unlikely that confusion can meaningfully occur (all similarly named projects are related to Arch Linux or developed by Arch Linux).

Thanks for the consideration!

cc @Nukesor @orhun @j-g00da

Maintenance or replacement?

Maintenance

Source code repositories URLs

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/alpm/alpm/-/tree/main/python-alpm?ref_type=heads

Contact and additional research

As we do not intend to replace existing packages (to our knowledge), we have not contacted anyone.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the PSF Code of Conduct

[dvzrv]

Hi again 👋
We would like to provide a bit more background for our request and (if possible) ask for a rough timeline on these matters.

We understand, that currently only a limited set of people works on these tickets and follows their own queue and that things may take a bit of time.
Unfortunately, we are bound by a deadline due to the funding of our project (https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/arch-linux-package-management), which ends at the end of 2025.

In the context of our dedicated milestone (https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/alpm/alpm/-/milestones/6) we attempt to provide this Python integration for another project in the Arch Linux ecosystem.
This work is unfortunately now blocked by not being able to release.

Currently, we believe that our only option is probably to use a different name on PyPI in the hopes that it will not trigger a similar heuristic to the one that led to this ticket.
If we do this, would it still be possible to use the alpm name in the future, e.g. by renaming again etc.?

That said, we are wondering what our options are given our own time constraints and we would appreciate feedback from the team working on these tickets. 🙏

[dvzrv]

We have renamed the package to python-alpm in the meantime.

FWIW, it was difficult to reverse engineer from the different places in warehouse (https://github.com/pypi/warehouse/blob/691680fa603cce2375505b3b265fe72c0e5ca451/warehouse/packaging/typosnyper.py, https://github.com/pypi/warehouse/blob/691680fa603cce2375505b3b265fe72c0e5ca451/warehouse/migrations/versions/d18d443f89f0_ultranormalize_name_function.py#L4) to understand whether that new name would not also be considered "too similar".

We await your guidance on any further move towards the alpm package name.

[Thespi-Brain]

Hi @dvzrv,

It looks like due to ultranormalization rules, an existing package aipm was blocking the name. I think in this case, going with python-alpm is a better option just to make sure users don't accidentally download the other project when they are trying to download yours and vice versa.