In the intervening time since the last release we have packaged, a new maintainer has taken over maintenance, and built the updates around a stack of other packages (rapidfuzz-cpp, python-rapidfuzz, scikit-build, etc). Now that all these dependencies are available I can look to actually do the update. As part of the updates, the current maintainer has deprecated the original pypi name of "python-Levenshtein" in favor of the more typical name without the "python-" prefix. He is continuing to maintain the "python-Levenshtein" pypi package for compatibility, but now it is just an empty package which defines "Levenshtein" as a dependency [2]. This means the upstream for the Fedora python-Levenshtein package must point to the new Levenshtein package in order to get the actual package contents. However, this means the metadata for the package indicates the name "Levenshtein" which translate to a provide for "python3.11dist(levenshtein)", but that is different than the currently provided "python3.11dist(python-levenshtein)", which current dependencies require. One option would be to simply manually add a "python3.11dist(python-levenshtein)" provide, but it seems this seems specifically prohibited in the Python packaging guidelines [3].

I think there are 2 options:

- Manually provide the legacy name outside of the python package meta-data

- Rebuild all users of the provide to use the new name

The main downside to the second approach is that nothing would provide the python-Levenshtein name, which is still present and usable via pypi and perfectly compatible with the current library implementation.

So what is the appropriate course of action here?

Thanks for the help,

Troy

2: https://github.com/maxbachmann/python-Levenshtein/blob/main/setup.cfg

3: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/Python/#Machine-readable-provides