Blog
Removing never-accessed files
Since piwheels generally aims to provide wheels for every release on PyPI, for every supported ABI, we end up building and hosting a lot of wheels that are rarely or never downloaded. We already introduced a second-tier HDD-backed archive storage for files which have not been downloaded recently....
PEP-658 metadata rollout
Wheel files include a metadata file containing information about the package: its dependencies, Python version requirements, and compatibility tags (such as ABI and platform). pip uses this metadata to determine whether a wheel is suitable for the system it's being installed on. PEP-658 allows...
PyPI stats 2026
Back in 2021 I did some analysis of PyPI package names and version strings in the post The rinds of the Cheese Shop menu. Five years on, let's see how things have changed. At the time of writing, PyPI contains: 736,344 packages with at least one version (up from 311,063 in 2021 — nearly...
Debian Trixie
Raspberry Pi have just released their operating system images based on Debian Trixie. Over the last few weeks, we've been working hard behind the scenes to prepare for this, building armv7 and armv6 wheels for the cp313 ABI, and we're pleased to announce we've completed the backlog and fully...
Notice: File URLs subject to change
Until now, piwheels has served its simple index, project pages, wheel files and even build log entries from a single server — a Raspberry Pi, of course. As our index has grown over the years, the amount of disk space we've needed to host all those files has grown — we currently have a 5TB SSD...
Half a billion downloads
piwheels has now passed 500,000,000 downloads! Now passed 500,000,000 downloads — piwheels.org (@piwheels) June 27, 2024 Here are the downloads each year, including the first six months of 2024: It will be interesting to see if/when we reach 1 billion!
Debian Buster EOL
Debian Buster was released on 6 July 2019, and it's been supported by the Debian team for over five years. On 30 June 2024 it reached its long term support end of life. Therefore we have stopped building new package releases on Buster, for the cp37m ABI. We will not delete existing cp37m wheels,...
Debian Bookworm and Raspberry Pi 5
Now that the Raspberry Pi 5 is announced and available, an Raspberry Pi OS release based on Debian Bookworm has been released, which includes Python 3.11. We've built wheels for cp311 and all project pages should now show the availability for each version: The big change in Bookworm is that you...
One hundred million customers served
Following a substantial record breaking spike in downloads, we recently passed the 100,000,000 mark. That's the total number of wheel files served from piwheels to date. Now passed 100,000,000 downloads — piwheels.org (@piwheels) September 19, 2022 When we reached 10 million in 3 years,...
Debian Stretch EOL
Debian Stretch was released on 17 June 2017, and it's been supported by the Debian team for over five years. On 30 June 2022 it reached its long term support end of life. Therefore we have stopped building new package releases on Stretch, for the cp35m ABI. We will not delete existing cp35m wheels,...