[Python-Dev] Rework nntlib? (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Wed Sep 15 13🔞19 CEST 2010

On Wed, 15 Sep 2010 01:06:29 pm geremy condra wrote:

I ran some statistics on the number of times modules out of the stdlib got imported a few months ago

What do those statistics measure?

The number of individual import statements with a given module name? The number of times those imports are actually executed? Something else?

and came up with a reasonably comprehensive list of the least-used things in the stdlib.

Least used by whom?

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 [...]

I don't know how to interpret that. Does that mean that there are eight modules in the whole of PyPi which import nntplib or poplib? If so, what does that tell us? Those eight modules could have three users between them, or they could be critical infrastructure for a quarter of the Internet.

I'm not trying to belittle the stats you have gathered, but without the context of what the numbers represent, it's impossible to put any meaning to them.

-- Steven D'Aprano

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