functionality to rename a project

[ewdurbin]

At this point, there are some admin tools in pypa/pypi-legacy i'm not comfortable using to rename projects when users request such an operation. Some examples are modifications of case or underscore/hyphen swaps which are equivalent after applying safe_name (myPackage => mypackage, or my-package -> my_package)

We should establish a process and enforce it via whatever mechanism we use to perform such an operation (code, admin ui, carrier pigeon).

[dstufft]

Renaming doesn't really work in general because even if you rename the file, the contents of said file are going to still be using the old name. The only renames that really work at all are if they normalize to the same thing.

[dstufft]

Well, I guess we could allow you to rename as long as the normalization still matched, would that satisfy this issue?

[brainwane]

In our meeting today we double-checked and agreed that this new admin feature can wait till after Warehouse launch.

[jacebrowning]

(I was brought here by https://twitter.com/brainwane/status/976489373607772161)

Here's my use case:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coverage-space was originally named coverage.space, but I realized this was problematic because that name requires quoting to include in a Pipfile. I thought I could upload newer versions of the PyPI package as coverage-space, but I was getting an error message along the lines of "name must start with coverage.space". I couldn't find a way to rename the PyPI package so I ended up deleting all versions and uploading 1.0 as coverage-space.

[brainwane]

Thanks @jacebrowning and I'm sorry for the trouble! We'll take this into account as we work on Warehouse and improve documentation and user support processes.

coverage.space/coverage-space looks like a cool project! (Here it is in the new PyPI.)

[jacebrowning]

Is there any way I can set up a redirect to avoid broken downloads?

It would be awesome if pip install coverage.space==1.2.3 redirected to coverage-space==1.2.3.