> I don’t know how much we can or should define “being used”. For instance, every package in existence is going to be downloaded via mirroring, so we can’t go by pure download counts (and some mirrors just use pip to do their downloading) and we’re going to need to interpret the download counts to some degree to try and gauge “usage”.

One idea— create a couple of “dummy” packages that do absolutely nothing. Then the download counts on those would give you a baseline for “downloaded but not used”

-CHB

Ultimately I think the underlying question we’re answering is whether names on PyPI are a community good or a personal good, and this PEP more or less states they are a community good

Which they absolutely are. PyPi is a community project — the names on pypi are just that — names on pypi. If you don’t want to be part of that community, you can use any name you want.

-CHB