PEP 541: transfer ownership of unmaintained xlrd, xlwt, et al

[inclusive-dev1]

Hi, I @inclusive-dev1, would like to transfer ownership of the names xlrd and xlwt to myself. Any other related packages will be taken up by a new PEP 541 request, as and when we discover they are abandoned and necessarily related.

The following uses statistics from the xlrd project to demonstrate that both xlrd and xlwt have been abandoned. The xlrd project was abandoned more recently than the xlwt project.

Sizable current user base

The current PyPI package has had 24 releases over the past 9 years, and has gained a very large community and user base in that time (myself included).

Over the past 6 months, there's been 11 issues opened, which indicates a very active user base. None of these issues had received any inputs from the maintainers.

Abandoned for 6 months

The last commit is just more than 6 months ago, on 2018 Dec 16, which is merely a change log update and PyPI package version update. The real work was done 8 months ago, in Sep 2018 (mainly to migrate from deprecated Python function time.clock() to time.perf_counter()).

The original author @sjmachin has not been active on GitHub since 2016; the author's last activity is the approval of a PR for xlwt back in 2016 Oct 11.

New package xlrdinc in use in-house

Our updates to xlrd were applied to a new PyPI package xlrdinc, and are tried and tested and in use in-house.

Once we obtain ownership of the PyPI package name xlrd, we will rename our GitHub repo from xlrdinc to xlrd. Currently, we are still hesitant to formally create a new package (with new name) that supersedes xlrd, given that xlrd already has a sizable user base. The health of a project depends on the user base, not on our engineering competence alone.

In the meantime, we are still fixing xlrd by applying patches to xlrdinc just so that we can get our own work done. We published the xlrdinc package since Mar 2019, but have been fixing up xlrd since 2018 and distributing as a locally installed wheel binary.

Dedicated to maintain, and to link to dependencies

We're committed to studying defusedxml in detail (already did), a package that xlrd relies on. We will ensure that xlrd moves in step with advancements in defusedxml (a very active project, updated just one month ago).

We endeavor to do the same for any other dependencies xlrd and xlwt have.

[jamadden]

In order to proceed with a PEP 541 transfer on the basis of projects being abandoned, all the PEP 541 criteria must be met:

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

By point (2), we're at least six months away from that happening.

The xlrd project, at least, has two owners, including @sjmachin as mentioned as well as @cjw296 (which account does show much more recent activity).

[cjw296]

Yeah, no idea who @inclusive-dev1 is, but they haven't tried to reach out anywhere...

[jamadden]

@cjw296 Thank you for responding! We have now established that an owner of both xlrd and xlwt is reachable using github. That eliminates the chance that those projects can be considered "abandoned."

@inclusive-dev1 With owners reachable, there is no role for PyPI moderators here. You'll need to discuss future plans with the owners of the projects.

[inclusive-dev1]

@jamadden Understood. Prayers answered, waiting since 2018. Thanks!

[cjw296]

@inclusive-dev1 - wow, you're not coming off any better with a comment like that.