PEP 541 Request: openqasm

[stevenheidel]

Project to be claimed

openqasm: https://pypi.org/project/openqasm

Your PyPI username

stevenheidel: https://pypi.org/user/stevenheidel

Reasons for the request

OpenQASM is an assembly language specification for quantum computing supported by IBM, AWS, and others. See https://openqasm.com for more information.

We have an implementation of a parser and an AST to enable libraries to support his assembly language. This is currently published on PyPi as openqasm3. There is an existing package with the name openqasm- we are requesting ownership of that package. The openqasm package also contains a Python parser for OpenQASM - but unfortunately this parser is incomplete and contains bugs/errors. The package has not had a release in 2 years.

I chose replacement rather than maintenance because none of the existing code is reused. However both projects claim to do the same thing so it's a bit of a gray area.

Iterating through the criteria:

1. "the project has been determined abandoned by the rules described above;"

• We have made multiple attempts to contact the owner using the listed email, Github, and LinkedIn.
• The last release was in 2019
• There's been no activity on the project homepage (Github) since Jan 2020 other than the issue that I filed attempting to contact the owner

2. "the candidate is able to demonstrate their own failed attempts to contact the existing owner;"

• See the contact and additional research section below

3. "the candidate is able to demonstrate that the project suggested to reuse the name already exists and meets notability requirements;"

• The OpenQASM project is notable and actively maintained, supported by an open source governance structure: https://medium.com/qiskit/introducing-a-technical-steering-committee-for-openqasm3-f9db808108e1

4. "the candidate is able to demonstrate why a fork under a different name is not an acceptable workaround;"

• The abandoned project claims to be effectively the same thing: a parser for the OpenQASM language. However the parser is incomplete and contains bugs/errors, causing potential for confusion from users who were expecting the official version.

5. "download statistics on the Package Index for the existing package indicate project is not being used;"

• According to my bigquery the pypi package has been downloaded only 59 times in the last month. It's hard to know if those downloads were expecting this particular package or an official OpenQASM package.

Maintenance or replacement?

Replacement

Source code repositories URLs

Current project: https://github.com/qevedo/openqasm
New project: https://github.com/openqasm/openqasm (note the Python package is located in the source/openqasm folder)

Contact and additional research

Multiple individuals from the OpenQASM technical steering committee attempted to contact the author by email from Oct 2021 - Feb 2022.

I found the author on LinkedIn and sent him an InMail on Oct 5, 2021 but have not received a response.

I filed a Github issue on the source repo on Oct 18, 2021 which has also not received a response: qevedo/openqasm#1

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the PSF Code of Conduct

[yeraydiazdiaz]

Hi @stevenheidel, I noticed a few days after you created this issue a new release was created for openqasm and seems to have been uploaded by @alxhotel whose username matches that of the project's owner in PyPI. Maybe he can clarify his intention towards the package?

[yeraydiazdiaz]

Since we have not heared back from @alxhotel a recent version was published we cannot consider this project abandoned and thus subject to transfer.