I'm also hit by this issue. My package virtualfish needs xdg from PyPI, but pyxdg stole the correct package name. Can I help with the fix or is there a time frame when there will be a solution?

I'm not sure what your optimal solution is here.

Keep in mind that since both provide 'import xdg', renaming the package wouldn't let you install both of them.

Also when renaming a repository package, we must add provides/conflicts/replaces which means a new python-xdg package would never be found from the AUR, and if manually installed, would prompt to replace it with the repo package on every singe pacman -Syu.

Fragmentation is fun.

For me the first step would be to rename the package. That way it has at least the correct name.

But your right. There will never be a proper python-xdg package with the xdg module from PyPI. The only thing I can think of is that one could create a python-xdg4 package. My current solution is to put this one-file python module next to the module in virtualfish that tries to import it. It's ugly but it works and the upstream docs for the xdg package even suggests it.

Or people could use the official Freedesktop https://pypi.org/project/pyxdg/ package, which sort of makes sense since XDG is a bunch of standards, not one, and https://pypi.org/project/pyxdg/ properly exposes that whereas https://pypi.org/project/xdg/ (developed half a decade later) is just asking for trouble merely by existing.

Once again I say... fragmentation is fun.

Totally agree. Still the package name is definitely wrong because the official xdg package that you mention is called pyxdg on PyPI and not xdg. So the archlinux package should also be called python-pyxdg to minimize confusion.

I will rename the package later today.

The replaces at least could be versioned, I guess, to only replace python-xdg<0.26-5

Also the new version is live. An AUR package could depend on python-xdg>=4.0 to ensure the "correct" version is installed.