Archive: 2020
piwheels stats 2020Q3
In the period of July — September 2020, 4,492,796 packages were downloaded from piwheels, bringing the total to 26,171,957. This has saved 80 years in the period, and 384 years in total! There were 40,435,591 pip searches, 597,675 project page hits and 332,517 web page hits in the period. August...
New opencv builds (including opencv 4.4.x)
The maintainer of the opencv packages on PyPI recently started uploading source distributions, so we can now build them automatically the way we build everything else, instead of manually, offline, and importing the files (which takes ages and can be prone to issues). So now we have armv6 and armv7...
Requires-Python support, new project page layout and a new JSON API
Some really important features have now been deployed to piwheels.org. We are pleased to announce the addition of support for the Requires-Python attribute specified in PEP-503 and PEP-345; a new project page layout; and the launch of the piwheels JSON API. Requires-Python Pure Python wheels (ones...
Canonicalise all the things!
Running a PyPI mirror must sound pretty straightforward. Every action you see on PyPI, you copy it. There's a list of packages, each with a list of versions. Packages and versions can be created and deleted, sure, but that's easily manageable, surely? When you assume... Sounds easy, but we made the...
New features — deletion, yanking and more
First of all, I should say a big thanks to our hosts Mythic Beasts for their continued support. They recently rolled out Pi 4s to their hosted Pi platform, and we've upgraded our main host — the one hosting piwheels.org — from a 3B running Jessie to a (4GB) 4B running Buster, and it has a 2TB...
piwheels stats 2020Q2
In the period of April — June 2020, 3,631,509 packages were downloaded from piwheels, bringing the total to 21,694,480. This has saved 71 years in the period, and 303 years in total! We also started logging searches, regardless of whether the search resulted in a download, which gives us more...
Debian Jessie EOL
Update 2020-07-01: The EOL date has now been reached, and Jessie support has ended. Debian Jessie was released on 25 April 2015, and it's been supported by the Debian team for over five years. On 30 June 2020 it reaches its long term support end of life. Therefore on this date we will stop building...
Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit (aarch64)
Today, Raspberry Pi announced the launch of a new 64-bit version of their operating system, which is now named "Raspberry Pi OS" rather than "Raspbian". Currently, piwheels does not support the 64-bit image, as we do not currently build or host aarch64 wheels. However, pip will still work without...
Legacy domain piwheels.hostedpi.com deprecated
When piwheels first launched in 2017, we used the default domain provided by Mythic Beasts' Pi cloud: piwheels.hostedpi.com, however, we quickly acquired the domain piwheels.org and this became the canonical URL. As of 2020-05-05 the piwheels.hostedpi.com domain is no longer in service. Please...
piwheels stats 2020Q1
In the period of January — March 2020, 3,317,443 packages were downloaded from piwheels, bringing the total to 18,062,971. This has saved nearly 60 years in the period, and 232 years in total! This was in no small part to The mysterious case of the unexplained downloads spike which turned out to be...
The mysterious case of the unexplained downloads spike
For several months, daily downloads have been fairly constant, and have shown slow and steady growth. Throughout January and the end of February, the minimum was 23,383 and the maximum was 38,139. The highest ever was 39,153. All of a sudden, on 4 March, we got 56, 225 downloads, up 48% on the...
How you can help
piwheels is an automated system which attempts to build every version of every package on PyPI on all supported Raspbian versions (Jessie, Stretch and Buster). There's a whole codebase and database to manage this process and it works really well. Maintaining this is a reasonable job in itself, but...
piwheels stats for 2019
In 2019, a total of 9,218,822 packages were downloaded, taking the total to 14,745,528. This saved 128 years 5 months during 2019, taking us to over 172 years saved overall. 37TB of files were downloaded, taking the total to 51TB. Average daily downloads: 2018: 14,519 2019: 25,257 Average...
piwheels stats 2019Q4
In the period of October — December 2019, 2,945,938 packages were downloaded from piwheels, bringing the total to 14,745,528. This has saved 49 years in the period, and 172 years in total! Each month had around a million downloads: which saved around between 13 and 18 years per month: 4...