[Python-Dev] PEP 594 - a proposal for unmaintained modules (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Fri May 24 02:55:44 EDT 2019

I don't know if this is a good idea or a terrible idea or somewhere in between, so I'm throwing it out to see if anyone likes it.

Let's add a third option to PEP 594 between "keep" and "remove": explicitly flagging a module as unmaintained. Unmaintained modules:

will raise a warning when imported that they are unmaintained;
will have their tests disabled;
possibly we move them into a seperate namespace: from unmaintained import aardvark
bug reports without patches will be closed Will Not Fix;
bug reports with patches may be accepted if some core dev is willing to review and check it in, but there is no obligation to do so;
should it turn out that someone is willing to maintain the module, it can be returned to regular status.

Plus side:

reduce the maintenance burden (if any) from the module;
while still distributing the module and allowing users to use it: "no promises, but here you go";
other implementations are under no obligation to distribute unmaintained modules.

Minus side:

this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy: with tests turned off, bit-rot will eventually set in and break modules that currently aren't broken.

Thoughts?

-- Steven