[Distutils] pypi suggestion

[Nick Coghlan]

On 3 June 2014 10:49, Noah Kantrowitz <noah at coderanger.net> wrote:
> Step one, define "popular" in numeric terms.

"Most depended on", but that's currently a pain to extract. Making it
easier to do that kind of analysis is actually one of my goals for
metadata 2.0.

Sites like http://pythonwheels.com/ use "most downloaded" because it's
readily available, rather than because it's a particularly good metric
- that's part of the reason why PyPI doesn't offer sorting by download
count natively (the other part is because the current focus of PyPI
development is the migration from the current legacy code base to
Warehouse).

One key issue with "most downloaded" is the fact that it overweights
direct downloads from PyPI by automated testing and deployment
systems. Anyone using a local caching proxy (which is the recommended
approach), relying on a Python redistributor (like a Linux distro, or
folks like ActiveState/Enthought/Continuum) or otherwise using third
party Windows installers doesn't show up in the download stats.

Cheers,
Nick.

P.S. For folks using Django, grids on Django Packages (e.g.
https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/rest/) can be a much better way
to find packages to use than looking directly on PyPI. I believe there
are OpenComparison based sites for some other Python subcommunities as
well.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia