[Distutils] how many users of easy_install or setuptools are there?

[zooko]

On Jun 13, 2008, at 11:46 PM, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:

 > Also, your claim of 'lots of people worldwide' is taken out of thin
 > air. I doubt you have evidence in favour or against.


Due to the "Shall we rename easy_install?" question, I became curious
about evidence of number of users.

Obviously we can't get reliable numbers of how many users there are,
since people can (and do) freely copy the software and use it without
sending any hint of their use to us.

However, here are a few numbers that might be indicative:

Google for "easy_install" has 141,000 hits.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools/0.6c8 shows the following
numbers of downloads:

File                              Type          PyVer   downloads
----                              ----          -----   ---------
setuptools-0.6c8-py2.5.egg        Python Egg    2.5     66,197
setuptools-0.6c8.win32-py2.4.exe  W32 installer 2.4        991
setuptools-0.6c8.win32-py2.5.exe  W32 installer 2.5      5,007
setuptools-0.6c8.win32-py2.3.exe  W32 installer 2.3        207
setuptools-0.6c8-1.src.rpm        RPM redhat4.3 any        752
setuptools-0.6c8-py2.4.egg        Python Egg    2.4     68,237
setuptools-0.6c8-py2.3.egg        Python Egg    2.3      6,684
setuptools-0.6c8.tar.gz           Source        any     12,647


Next, I wonder about how many people got setuptools or easy_install
with their operating system instead of downloading it.  Unfortunately,
Debian's popularity-contest seems to be broken, so I can't use that to
try to get an estimate of how many Debian users use the setuptools as
distributed by Debian.

http://popcon.debian.org


Regards,

Zooko