Request: transfer of the benchkit PyPI distribution to active maintainers

Hi Bench AI team (cc @Aneesh-Pothuru, @govindansriram),

I'm writing to ask whether you'd be willing to transfer the benchkit PyPI name to me.

I'm Antonio Paolillo, a researcher at VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). For several years I've maintained an unrelated open-source project also called `benchkit`, a declarative performance evaluation framework for system software, published at ICPE 2026 ([paper preprint][paper], [project repo][repo]).

We currently distribute on PyPI as [`pybenchkit`][pybenchkit] because the bare [`benchkit`][bench-ai-pypi] name is held by your project. This has become a recurring source of confusion for our users, who frequently install the wrong package when searching for `"benchkit"` on PyPI.

It looks like your `benchkit` package has been inactive for some time:

- last PyPI release: 2023-09-28 (v1.0.2),
- [this repository][this-repo]: last pushed 2023-12-10,
- your homepage currently returns HTTP 404,
- your team appears to have moved on to other projects.

If the project is indeed wound down, would you be willing to transfer ownership of the `benchkit` PyPI distribution to me so we can continue maintaining the name actively? The PyPI side is straightforward: a current maintainer of the `benchkit` project would just need to add me as an Owner on the PyPI project (PyPI username: [`apaolillo`][pypi-me]). I'll handle the rest.

If you'd prefer not to transfer, please just let us know. If we don't hear back, we may file a name request via PyPI's [PEP 541][pep541] process, but we'd much prefer to handle this directly with you.

Thanks for your time.

Antonio Paolillo
antonio.paolillo@vub.be
https://github.com/apaolillo

[paper]: https://icpe2026.spec.org/preprint/benchkit_A_Declarative_Framework_for_Composable_Performance_Evaluation_Of_System_Software.pdf
[repo]: https://github.com/open-s4c/benchkit
[pybenchkit]: https://pypi.org/project/pybenchkit/
[bench-ai-pypi]: https://pypi.org/project/benchkit/
[this-repo]: https://github.com/bench-ai/benchkit
[pep541]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0541/
[pypi-me]: https://pypi.org/user/apaolillo/