Transparent renaming of packages

[javiereguiluz]

First, thanks to all the Composer community and its leaders for the amazing work you do!

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There's been a lot of questions about renaming packages: #47, #225, #496, etc. The current best practice is to:

1. Update the name in composer.json on the master branch
2. Resubmit the package to Packagist using the new name
3. Mark the old package as Abandoned on Packagist, and point people to the new package
4. Lose all the download stats and history of the original package

We recently renamed symfony/symfony-demo to symfony/demo on GitHub. Everything kept working thanks to the internal GitHub redirections ... but you still have to create the project with composer create symfony/symfony-demo instead of composer create symfony/demo

In this comment you said that losing the stats/history is not such a big deal ... but I think it's devastating for the reputation of the project:

• Existing users will see that the (old) package is abandoned --> not trustworthy!
• New users will see that the (new) package has no downloads --> not trustworthy!

My question: are you open to the idea of transparent renamings as performed by GitHub and others? Thank you!

[javiereguiluz]

I'm closing this because I already renamed my package following the recommended best practices, so I won't need this feature. Cheers!