On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 08:08:35PM -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
>         - 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).
>     - 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.

There are other ways to get usage statistics. Debian has Popularity
Contest (http://popcon.debian.org) statistics for python libraries. e.g.
babel and twisted:

    http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=python-babel
    http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=twisted

Of course, the these are probably still "Highly inaccurate", just in a
different way;)

-- 
Brian Sutherland
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