Feature request: a `--leave-sdist`/`--skip-sdist` option

[agriyakhetarpal]

Hi there, thanks a lot for this project!

I'm opening this issue to ask whether an option to skip sdists from being cleaned up could be included in the CLI, such as --skip-sdist or --leave-sdist (perhaps "leave" is better due to the existing option --leave-most-recent-only).

Here are some points that make up my rationale for this feature request:

• sizes for projects with big binaries are almost always taken up by wheels and not by sdists,
• in many cases, deleting an entire project's distribution files means that it becomes uninstallable (which has very much been noted in the WARNING section in the README)
• to save up on sizes, packages opt for a solution where they often delete all the wheels for old/rc/beta/non-stable versions, but keep their sdists, as this still allows for a mechanism to let package users and redistributors compile from the source distribution rather than not being able to get any distribution at all
• this is a middle ground for those who haven't been authorised for extra space for their packages on PyPI

While my use case is primarily across personal projects I've put up on PyPI where my sdist sizes vary but are in the KiB range, and wheels range around ~25 MiB (and thus add up quickly), I imagine it would be useful for the needs of several other major and minor projects, too.

If it's a "yes" from the maintainers here, I'm also willing to try putting together a PR to do so and contribute!

Thank you for your time!

[arcivanov]

Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately the feature you're requesting might not be possible. The app deletes a release, not assets within the release. I'm not sure there is an API option to delete an asset/artifact to begin with (either UI or API). I'll take a look at it closely but don't have your hopes up.

[arcivanov]

Good news, there is an option to delete assets from a release individually. That said, you can't reupload any of the deleted files once you do that.

[agriyakhetarpal]

Oh, that's unfortunate! I've actually been deleting files individually at the moment with the way you've suggested, and I was a bit frustrated at how cumbersome it is to do so – with five checkboxes and then typing out the project name manually (for good reason of course, but a user might be aware of the implications and thus may not want to be informed of them every time). I could try to hack up a Selenium script to do this instead, and if I'm able to get to it, I'll share it here for others who may come across the same requirement as mine.

Thank you!

I'll close this issue out as "not planned" for now.

[arcivanov]

We can leave it open, as there is a chance it can be implemented. I would suggest using "--leave-sources" as it's a more accurate description and correlates with how PyPI is calling them.

[agriyakhetarpal]

Sure thing. Sounds good to me!