unclecode-litellm shadows the upstream litellm package; the quarantine that motivated the fork has been lifted

[n24q02m]

Follow-up to #1864, where the unclecode-litellm fork was adopted. The emergency that
motivated it has passed, and the fork now costs downstream users something it did not
cost back then.

The fork's premise no longer holds

When #1864 was filed, PyPI had quarantined the entire litellm package — every
version was uninstallable, so pinning a fork was the only way to keep pip install crawl4ai working.

That is no longer the case. On PyPI today:

• litellm latest is 1.93.0
• 1.82.7, 1.82.8, 1.82.9 are gone — exactly the compromised releases
• 1.82.6 and everything from 1.83.0 onward are present and installable

The quarantine was lifted and only the bad releases were removed.

What the fork costs now

crawl4ai 0.9.2 requires unclecode-litellm==1.81.13, which installs a top-level
litellm package — the same import name shipped by the upstream distribution. An
environment that needs both ends up with two different versions written into one
site-packages/litellm/, and which files survive is decided by install order rather
than by either project.

Nothing errors at install time. It surfaces later as:

ImportError: cannot import name '_redact_string' from 'litellm._logging'

The same dependency pair passed on one CI run and failed on another two minutes later,
with nothing changed but resolution order. Because the two distributions have different
names, pip and uv see no conflict to report — they install both, and one silently
overwrites the other's files.

This is not fixable downstream. A [tool.uv] override-dependencies entry works for a
source install, but overrides are not recorded in wheel metadata, so anyone installing
a dependent package from PyPI resolves crawl4ai's requirements directly and hits the
collision again.

Suggested fix

Return to upstream litellm with a floor that excludes the compromised window:

litellm>=1.83.0

1.83.0 is the first release after the three removed versions, so the floor cannot
resolve to a compromised build even if one were ever restored. This keeps pip install crawl4ai exactly as it is today — full package, LLM support included, no extras to
remember — while removing the shadowing.

If there is a reason to stay on the fork, the collision can also be resolved by having
it install as unclecode_litellm and importing it under an alias:

import unclecode_litellm as litellm

Same outcome for crawl4ai users, and the fork stops occupying a name it doesn't own.

A third option, if the fork is meant as a global drop-in replacement: publish the
crawler half as its own distribution (crawl4ai-core or similar), leaving crawl4ai
as the full LLM-enabled package most people install.

Happy to send a PR for whichever direction you prefer.