Consolidate the "Project Summaries" by removing items and grouping the remaining ones

[venthur]

Should we consolidate the list "Project Summaries" a bit? Currently it is very long, and the order is quite random. I'd propose two changes to mitigate that:

1. remove things that are not really relevant
2. structure the items by use case

Below there's a list of all projects currently listed, with a remark about last update and "github popularity". In my opinion we could remove half of the projects here and group the remaining ones by use case.

For the non-pypa projects I suggest to remove the ones that are clearly unmaintained and (rather aggressively) the ones with a very low "github popularity". For the pypa projects, we could remove the more "fringe" cases projects, but we may not have to. Again, the goal being to have a useful overview for the users about the tools of the trade instead of a random selection of things with little relation to each other.

Project	last updated	forks/stars	remove?
bandersnatch	recently	112/311	is this really relevant for installation and packaging?
build	recently	70/319
cibuildwheel	recently	150/1.1k
distlib (wrong url)	recently	13/20
flit	recently	97/1.7k
hatch	recently	116/2.6k
packaging	recently	199/396
pip	recently	2.6k/8k
pipenv	recently	1.7k/23k
pipfile	recently	148/3.1k	not part of any standard, i.e. PEP
pipx	recently	239/5.1k
packaging.python.org	recently	560/1.1k	does this belong into the list?
readme_renderer	recently	91/133	low relevance?
setuptools	recently	888/1.7k
trove-classifiers	recently	61/68	low relevance?
twine	recently	269/1.3k
virtualenv	recently	944/4.2k
warehouse	recently	871/3k
wheel	recently	116/323
---	---	---
buildout	recently	172/537	yes - low relevance
conda			yes - different ecosystem
devpi	recently	104/562	yes - low relevance
enscons	recently	3/23	yes - low relevance
hashdist	2016	43/105	yes - probably unmaintained
multibuild	2021-10	77/2	yes - low relevance
pdm	recently	104/2.5k
pex	recently	221/2.1k
pip-tools	recently	521/5.9k
pipwheels	recently	22/221	yes - low relevance
poetry	recently	1.6k/19.9k
pypiserver	recently	251/1.4k
pyscaffold	recently	157/1.5k
scikit-build	recently	95/324	yes - low relevance
shiv	recently	85/1.4k
spack	recently	1.6k/2.7k
zest.releaser	recently	60/185	yes - low relevance

The grouping by use case is a bit more difficult as we'd need to settle for a set of tags or so first before we can start grouping the items accordingly.

[pradyunsg]

the order is quite random

It's not? It's two alphabetical lists -- PyPA projects followed by non-PyPA projects (at least, it's supposed to be) that are related to Python Packaging and designed as general workflow tools.

---

Anyway, I think categorising the projects by usecase instead of whether they're a PyPA project would be an improvement. The main question with that is what the categories should be, which is honestly unclear at a first glance.

I don't think we should be removing any of the projects that were "recently active".

[venthur]

Yes the categories are indeed not trivial. One could start with a catch-all category "miscellaneous" and put everything in there. And try to work out some more useful ones. I would order the categories by importance, and we should allow packages to appear in several categories if they fulfill several roles. That will also make our life easier finding useful categories. Here's an example (this is not meant to be anything final, just a demonstrator):

---

PEP 518 compatible build system

some description of the category goes here

• setuptools
• flit
• hatch
• build
• ...

Packaging

some description of the category goes here

• setuptools
• wheel
• flit
• hatch
• poetry
• ...

virtual environments

some description of the category goes here

• virtualenv
• pipx
• poetry
• ...

miscellaneous

...