As previously posted here: https://dev.to/koti/updating-an-important-but-stale-python-library-3o6i, me and Dimitry cooperated on updating a Python library important for the smooth operations of his company.

Unfortunately, it seems that its original author never accepted our previous Pull Request to revive the profanity-check package. As a result, Github issues were kept being opened by other developers asking about the library and issues they had while using it. What surprised us the most, was this one: https://github.com/vzhou842/profanity-check/issues/28, where someone actually recommended our fork of the project as a “new version available here, that solves the issue very well”.

Considering this and seeing that package seemed to have many users, either in production or for personal use, we decided that re-publishing the same library would be a great idea to bring the package back to life and make it accessible for more developers to experiment with. The main problem was following up with scikit-learn package’s updates which rendered the initial models problematic as the next versions were released.

After taking this quick and handy tutorial from Real Python: https://realpython.com/courses/how-to-publish-your-own-python-package-pypi/, we made some minor modifications to the project’s repository and uploaded our updated version to PyPi.

Outcome turned out to be really beneficial during the process and made us better both as people and developers. For example, we found out that when uploading a PyPI package, you don’t really sync your repository to the PyPI project page. You only upload a tar’ed “/dist” directory’s content produced after running the python setup.py bdist_wheel command.

We also realised that many developers can sometimes be demanding things out of nowhere. They may request features and bug fixes, unable to understand that open-source software main purpose is the community’s contribution in every possible way. They should consider putting some work on the projects themselves or contributing in other ways or at least saying “thanks”.

At any case, taking on the “responsibility” of maintaining a Python package, widely used by the community seems to be an exciting journey on the open-source software adventure. It makes you feel proud and responsible for ensuring that other people’s projects continue to operate smoothly.

You can find the package and instructions for its installation here: https://pypi.org/project/alt-profanity-check/. Also, the source code can be found here: https://gitlab.com/dimitrios/alt-profanity-check. Contributions and new feature ideas are more than welcome.