PyPI Organizations (2023) | Hacker News Reader

PyPI Organizations (2023)

blog.pypi.org

42 pointscalpaterson13 comments

PyPI is such an important service and as a Python user it's easy to take for granted that it just works. I recently had to make a config update from my project's GitHub repo to PyPI and lost the password and had to do account recovery, and then suddenly realized "wow, they take care of a lot of other orgs", and "wow, this is a TON of ops work" -- see the issues _just_ on account recovery: https://github.com/pypi/support/issues.

This is from 2023 and you still need to request approval for an organization. The approval process is also very slow (my friend requested an organization for us last fall and we still don't have it).

Is it possible they reached out to you requesting some information and you missed it? According to this thread they have cleared the queue recently https://discuss.python.org/t/state-of-pypi-organizations/337...

This is useful to hear about! I'll see if my friend heard anything.

[2023]

Looks like it's taken a while to really get rolling though; as early as January of this year they had thousands of applications in the backlog and 0 paying customers, per https://discuss.python.org/t/state-of-pypi-organizations/337...

However, later in the thread there are updates that look a little better.

It would be great if PyPI could use their position to offer internal mirrors with additional security scanning... and then use that capability to increase their malware detection on every package!

You can't make suggestions or criticize PyPI. For 20 years, it has been the worst package manager of any language in existence, yet they still get tons of funding and never take external suggestions. In that sense, the funding model is successful.

PyPI is a package index, not a package manager.

I can also say from direct experience that (1) it doesn't get very much funding, and (2) they take plenty of external suggestions and contributions.

From my understanding these organizations don’t yet do anything. At least they do not grant a namespace unlike they do on npm. That might change though.

> From my understanding these organizations don’t yet do anything

A key thing they do is offer finer-grained roles[1] for project and team (i.e. subteams within an org) management.

You're right that they don't provide namespaces, yet. I believe there's ongoing discussion about how to enable that, including via PEP 752 and 755.

[1]: https://docs.pypi.org/organization-accounts/roles-entities/

The big thing is auth so that multiple owners can separately have 2FA set up and push releases, generate service tokens, etc.

Organizations cannot yet create tokens, only the setting up trusted publishing is supported, but that only works on four providers and e.g. not in self hosted gitlabs.

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