Hello! I'm a new maintainer of a fairly popular niche project called GraphFrames (GitHub link). The project was in "maintenance mode" for a couple of years, and now I'm excited to help bring it back to life. However, I'm currently facing a serious issue with Sonatype and could use some advice on how to proceed.

Historically, GraphFrames' JARs were published in the Spark Packages repository (link), which was automatically synchronized with Maven Repository (link). The project uses the org.graphframes namespace internally. Unfortunately, the Spark Packages project is now semi-defunct, and the synchronization to Maven is broken.

There is strong demand from GraphFrames users and contributors to resume publishing the project in Maven Central. However, the problem is that the "graphframes.org" domain is not available (whois link). I reached out to Sonatype Support to request permission to register and verify the org.graphframes namespace in Maven Central, but their response was clear: it is not possible.

Here is their response:

Hello Sem,
I am sorry to inform you that it is not possible to register a namespace for a domain that you do not control for Central Portal.

I tried to argue that GraphFrames has a large community, 1k stars on GitHub, nearly 10 years of publishing under the org.graphframes namespace, and numerous existing tutorials and blog posts, but this did not change their decision.

One option is to migrate the project from org.graphframes to io.github.graphframes, but this would be a major disruption for users and dependent projects. It would also render all existing videos, tutorials, and blog posts about GraphFrames outdated.

What else can I do in this situation? DNS, domains, and Sonatype are new topics for me, as I have primarily focused on coding in the past. I would greatly appreciate any advice or guidance on how to handle this issue effectively.

Thanks in advance!