[Python-Dev] Rework nntlib?

[geremy condra]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> On 9/14/2010 4:40 PM, Jon Ribbens wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 11:43:46AM -0500, skip at pobox.com wrote:
>>> We got rid of gopherlib a few years ago (deprecated in 2.5, presumably gone
>>> in 2.6).  I suspect the NNTP protocol has a greatly diminished user base as
>>> well, GMANE's presence notwithstanding.
>>
>> NNTP is *very* considerably less dead than gopher.
>
> That's an interesting metric. Would you like to list the extant
> libraries implementing protocols that are *not* "*very* considerably
> less dead than gopher"? ;-)
>
> regards
>  Steve

I ran some statistics on the number of times modules out of the stdlib
got imported a few months ago and came up with a reasonably
comprehensive list of the least-used things in the stdlib. For the
record, since I wound up parsing import statements and know some
garbage data got in, its reasonable to assume that a few otherwise
valid imports aren't recorded here. But enough with the disclaimers.

I'm not sure what the name of the library was originally, but the word
'gopher' does not appear in any of the imports that I was able to
parse in pypi. By contrast, nntplib and poplib are tied at 8, and as
would be expected there are only a few recognizable names below that-
aepack, aetypes, and posixfile are each stuck at 0; fractions,
Bastion, and xdrlib have three, etc.

The top five are os, sys, unittest, re, and time (in that order) with
27468, 18334, 14714, 13019, and 9906 imports respectively.

If it doesn't annoy I can post the whole list, or email it privately
to the interested.

Geremy Condra