[Catalog-sig] New PyPI stats available

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Richard Jones <richard at python.org> wrote:
> On 19 February 2013 10:03, Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org> wrote:
>> Le 18/02/2013 17:58, Richard Jones a écrit :
>>> Thanks, I'm aware of vanity; it reports on one package. The
>>> latest-totals is all packages.
>>
>> I can’t say if you’re talking about a project, a release or a
>> distribution here.
>
> "package" is a name registered on PyPI. "release" is a version of a
> "package." A "distribution" isn't referred to as far as I'm aware, but
> could be a label applied to what PyPI calls "package file" - a single
> file related to a "release."

We've been trying to move to "distribution" as the thing projects
register on PyPI to better distinguish them from the kind of "package"
you can import directly.

The general taxonomy as I understand it:

- projects are an overall activity. They have policies, bug trackers,
source control systems, mailing lists, developers, etc and may control
multiple distributions. Hence "Project-URL"
- distributions are what you register on PyPI: you intend to
distribute Python software using that name. Hence "Requires-Dist",
etc.
- packages and modules are the things you can actually import at runtime
- most, but not all, distributions will ship exactly one module or
package with the same name as the distribution
- a version is a [pre-|post-]release as described in the metadata spec
- sdists are source archives for a particular version of a distribution
- wheels are binary archives for a particular version of a distribution
- eggs are binary archives in an alternative (discouraged) format

We can get away with PyPI continuing to be the Python *Package* Index
(rather than the Python *Distribution* Index), because most
distributions contain packages, and it isn't worth the hassle of
trying to change it. It would be good to have PyPI calling
distributions by that name in the UI, though.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia