[Catalog-sig] What is the point of pythonpackages.com?

[Alex Clark]

Hi Stefan,

On 2/4/12 2:40 PM, Stefan Krah wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I wonder what the point of a site like pythonpackages.com is. For my
> package (cdecimal)

I think the following explanation applies to all Python packages:

- http://pythonpackages.com/about#why

Download count is important, but it's certainly not the only criteria 
one can use to evaluate a package.

> it spreads misinformation on two counts:
>
>    1) The number of downloads cannot be established since cdecimal
>       is not hosted on PyPI.

pythonpackages.com considers this to be "zero downloads". if there was 
an API for off-site downloads to report back to PyPI then maybe we could 
use it to report those statistics on pythonpackages.com. AFAIK there is 
currently no such thing. (I used to have a tool tip in place that 
explained this; I'll put it back ASAP. crate.io has something similar in 
place IIRC.)


>
>    2) "Now supports Python 3!" is false since cdecimal has supported
>       Python3 from the very beginning.


Fair enough, I changed the message to "Supports Python 3". Is that 
better? FWIW there is an issue tracker here for this sort of thing:

- https://bitbucket.org/pythonpackages/pythonpackages.com/issues


>
>
> Otherwise it displays Google ads


 >>> True


> and the same information as PyPI,
> only in a less readable manner.

This is subjective, so I can't really offer an intelligent reply (though 
I can tell you that I know people typically either love or hate Twitter 
bootstrap; personally, I like it "enough".)


Alex




>
>
> Stefan Krah


-- 
Alex Clark · http://pythonpackages.com