Hi Donald, On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 20:08 -0400, Donald Stufft wrote: > Hello! > > As you have have noticed the download counts on PyPI are no longer updating. > Originally this was due to an issue with the script that processes these > download counts. However I have now removed the download counts from the PyPI > webui and their use via the API is considered deprecated. > > There are numerous reasons for their removal/deprecation some of which are: > - Technically hard to make work with the new CDN > - The CDN is being donated to the PSF, and the donated tier does not > offer any form of log access
What would be involved money/effort wise to get such access? > - The work around for not having log access would greatly reduce the > utility of the CDN > - Highly inaccurate > - A number of things prevent the download counts from being > inaccurate, some of which include: > - pip download cache > - Internal or unofficial mirrors > - Packages not hosted on PyPI (for comparisons sake) > - Mirrors or unofficial grab scripts causing inflated counts > (Last I looked 25% of the downloads were from a known mirroring script). given the CDN usage of mirrors may drop soon. > - Not particularly useful > - Just because a project has been downloaded a lot doesn't mean it's > good > - Similarly just because a project hasn't been downloaded a lot > doesn't mean it's bad > > In short because it's value is low for various reasons, and the tradeoffs > required to make it work are high It has been not an effective use of > resources. > > The API will continue to return values for it in order to not break scripts, > however in the future all these values will be set to 0. The Web UI has been > modified to no longer display it. While download counts do have the weeknesses you describe they also provide a rough indication of usage which many of us referred to. I used it to determine interest and it partly drove my development efforts. From that angle i am not happy about the change but of course i see the benefits. Not having download counts maybe lets us think harder about better metrics. The number of projects using a package as a dep might be one. cheers, holger > ----------------- > Donald Stufft > PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA > > _______________________________________________ > Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
