most popular Python projects

This is a long message, if you reply, you'll probably want to <snip> the
parts that don't pertain to your reply...

I have started doing an informal survey of SF stats, emailing some project
leads, etc. to figure out what the most popular Python projects are outside
of the standard libs. I want this info for myself so I have a more accurate
view of which projects are popular with developers and end-users, but the
topic is also relevant to this list, so I'm bringing it up here.

There are a lot of ways to judge popularity of a project, but the number of
developers, downloads, and users on the mailing list are probably most
relevant for our purposes. I'm looking for the project areas that resonate
with developers as well as potential funding sources from end users where a
project has broad user appeal (BitTorrent, SpamBayes). It might be quite
difficult to judge the popularity of projects which are primarily based on
Linux due to the diverse ways someone might get one of those packages.

If you can think of projects that qualify that would be great. It would
probably be useful to track open source and commercial projects where Python
is used as a scripting or glue language, even if the primary app is written
in another language (e.g. CVSGui projects, Blender, Paint Shop Pro 8, etc.).

Currently, SF stats are understated as SF is in the process of processing a
backlog. Furthermore, SF has no way of showing top projects by monthly
downloads, most active doesn't equate to most downloaded, so you have to
browse the Python trove for potential candidates...

http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=178

Unfortunately, some projects like Twisted don't have real web/download stats
yet.

Anyway, here's some info on BitTorrent, SpamBayes, wxPython, Jython,
MailMan, Chandler, MySQL for Python, Twisted, and pywin32, and Pyrex; I'll
send a separate post on Plone that I received from Andy McKay. On the GUI
front I would love to have numbers for PyQt as well as some way of judging
how many people develop with tkinter since it is the default GUI that ships
with Python. I need numbers for Zope and ZODB. I'm curious about ReportLab
too. Stephan do you want to disclose numbers for Wing IDE?

ka
---


BitTorrent
==========
As mentioned previously, BitTorrent is extremely popular with end-users with
1.3-1.5 millions downloads per month. It has also spawned quite a few GUI
front-ends done in Python that are getting a lot of downloads.


SpamBayes
=========
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_id=61702

SpamBayes is quite popular with end-users, most likely due to the Outlook
plugin; downloads are now consistently over 25K per month. SpamBayes has 25
developers listed on the SF page.


wxPython
========
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_id=10718

Downloads are now consistently over 20K per month. There are 639 regular
subscribers to wxPython-users, and around 275 digest subscribers. Robin Dunn
is the only real developer of wxPython, though there are more on the
wxWidgets side of things and many people like myself that don't do much on
the core, but help out on the Python bits. Boa Constructor, the wxPython GUI
builder gets a few thousand downloads per month.


Jython
======
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_id=12867
A few thousand downloads per month.


MailMan
=======
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_id=103
2-3K downloads per month. Obviously, popular with people outside the current
Python user base since among other sites it is used at SourceForge. Mailman
should be a good source for PSF donations and Python PR, we just aren't
leveraging it yet.
http://mailman.sourceforge.net/inthenews.html


Chandler (OSAF)
===============
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/twiki/bin/view/Chandler/QuantitativeCommunityI
nvolvementMetrics

Chandler has extensive stats. While it has a lot of mailing list
subscribers, they are still pretty early in the development cycle, so
despite being high-profile, the number of downloads isn't that high yet, but
this should change as Chandler releases mature.


MySQL for Python
================
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_id=22307

4K-5K downloads per month. Andy Dustman is the only developer.


Twisted
=======
Itamar said:
"Issue is, we don't use SF file distribution system (it's horrible, and
hard to automate) and instead just use the SF website, twisted.sf.net,
for which we have no real stats... But, we use a redirect script for
downloads, so the web stats for twistedmatrix.com may cover some of the
downloads. Since Feb 1 we had... about 5100 hits on that, Dec 1st - End
of January was 4500 hits (did a quick grep | wc). I can you more
detailed breakdowns if you want (just not this week).

This of course doesn't count people using debian packages, or FreeBSD
ports, etc.."


pywin32 (formerly win32all)
===========================
pywin32 has only recently moved to SF and Mark doesn't have access to stats
on http://starship.python.net/.


Pyrex
=====
I queried Greg Ewing about Pyrex because Paul Prescod had submitted a Pyrex
proposal for OSCON and I had seen a number of blog entries about it
recently. Based on the numbers below, I don't think it qualifies as a "hot"
Python project yet. At a minimum a project should have a few thousand
downloads per month, preferably more.

Greg sent the following download numbers for Pyrex since November last year:

Nov 2003	511
Dec 2003	411
Jan 2004	683
Feb 2004	484
Mar 2004	174