Re: most popular Python projects

On Mar 12, 2004, at 8:31 AM, Michael McLay wrote:

> On Wednesday 10 March 2004 5:58 pm, Kevin Altis wrote:
>> This is a long message, if you reply, you'll probably want to <snip>  
>> the
>> parts that don't pertain to your reply...
>
>> 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.).
>>
>> 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.
>
> PyGtk
> ======
>
> PyGtk is available through ftp and mirrors which makes it difficult to  
> count
> downloads. Also, since PyGtk is included with the Redhat and Mandrake
> distributions, the count would not represent the size of the user  
> base. The
> GUI toolkit is used extensively by Redhat for building the system
> administration tools, so counting Redhat installations might be a good
> starting number for the userbase. There are 503 regular subscribers  
> and 75
> digest subscribers.

Alex Roitman sent the following to Michael and I:
"pygtk is in Debian since very long ago. Debian has arguably one of the  
largest user bases among linux distros. I don't think one can get a  
good estimate on the number of downloads, since every distro has a lot  
of their own mirrors, in addition to gnome mirrors."

Phil Thompson sent the following info on PyQt:
"The only hard figure I can give you is that there are 522 people  
currently subscribed to the mailing list. Download figures don't make  
too much sense as PyQt is included with all the Linux distros."

This is very interesting. I'm starting to wonder if one of the primary  
interests of a large percentage of Python developers is GUI  
programming. One way to look at that question might be which Python  
projects have mailing lists with over 500 subscribers? If GUI building  
is more popular than we previously suspected, then we need better topic  
guides and info on python.org for potential converts.

Also, I think it is even more important to build up a more complete  
list of C++ GUI apps that use Python as their "scripting" language; I  
think I'll post about that on c.l.py and get other people to help build  
the list. Once you see that you can easily add scripting to your C++  
app via Python you might also start to see that all or at least parts  
of your app could probably be written in Python as well. I wrote a  
brief bit about C++ bias for building apps two years ago and it is  
still relevant.

http://altis.manilasites.com/stories/storyReader$39

ka