Remove stubs for characteristic?

[AlexWaygood]

The characteristic library hasn't had any changes since October 2020. It also has a big warning on its GitHub homepage saying:

No Maintenance Intended
Warning
Characteristic is unmaintained. Please have a look at its successor attrs.

It doesn't seem like we've had any issues or PRs relating to these stubs for a long time. Should we remove them?

(Side note: I'm not sure what our policy is for removing stubs for unmaintained libraries that don't have type hints -- we don't have anything in CONTRIBUTING.md.)

[JelleZijlstra]

I don't think we should necessarily remove stubs for unmaintained packages, since people may still use them and providing types could provide a valuable service. Even if the package only declares support for Python 3.3-3.4, it may still work fine on newer versions.

In this case though, I think it's fine to remove, since there's been little interest in the stubs since they were contributed in #771, and the package has been unmaintained for so long.

[srittau]

Third-party packages are generally removed from typeshed when one of the
following criteria is met:

[...]

• the package does not support any of the Python versions supported by
  typeshed.

That said, I have no objections with removing it. The types package remains, after all, we just can't update it easily. Cc @hynek as author.

We could add another field, similar to obsolete_since to METADATA.toml to add a comment to a final upload.

[AlexWaygood]

I don't think we should necessarily remove stubs for unmaintained packages

I wasn't suggesting going on a blitz to remove all unmaintained packages from typeshed — I was just looking at the source code for this one for another reason, and was struck by the warning on the GitHub homepage :)

In this case though, I think it's fine to remove, since there's been little interest in the stubs since they were contributed in #771, and the package has been unmaintained for so long.

The types package remains, after all, we just can't update it easily.

+1 to both of these thoughts.

[hynek]

For me the question is mostly about how useful those stubs are at all? Since it's attrs-like, you rather need a plugin for it to be useful with mypy?

The last release is 8 years ago, I had no idea that stubs actually exist, and it has only 30k downloads per month (which is suspect are only mirrors). So I have no hard feelings if y'all dropped them.