One cool feature of functional package managers such as Nix and Guix is that the dependency graphs are entirely transparent and can be inspected programmaticall

One cool feature of functional package managers such as Nix and Guix is that the dependency graphs are entirely transparent and can be inspected programmatically. I wrote a script that lists the number of dependents for each package in Guix by traversing the package graphs: https://gist.github.com/mbakke/f354272666fbef09c5229f7b853778f1 https://gist.github.com/mbakke/f354272666fbef09c5229f7b85377... Running it takes about 16 seconds on my laptop, and piping to 'grep -v bootstrap | sort -rn | tail -n 20' gives: 16695 guile 16692 ld-wrapper 14686 pkg-config 14512 perl 14444 ncurses 13135 readline 13133 zlib 13022 libffi 12470 xz 12448 libunistring 12433 openssl 12353 bash 12050 libxml2 12016 gettext-minimal 11950 tar 11942 bzip2 11896 expat 11857 tzdata 11850 net-base 11846 python-minimal (GCC, glibc and binutils are missing for complicated reasons, but should be up there with Guile) By changing (all-packages) on line 26 to: (fold-packages (lambda (package result) (if (string-prefix? "python-" (package-name package)) (cons package result) result)) '())) We get the most popular Python projects: 6672 python-setuptools-scm 6667 python-nose 6662 python-pyparsing 6662 python-more-itertools 6661 python-wcwidth 6660 python-py 6660 python-pluggy 6660 python-atomicwrites 6657 python-six 6593 python-mock 6587 python-appdirs 6586 python-lxml 6584 python-filelock 6584 python-distlib 6583 python-sortedcontainers 6580 python-hypothesis 6577 python-elementpath 6576 python-xmlschema 6575 python-pytest 6303 python-libxml2 This approach misses "end user" packages such as browsers and QEMU, but provides some insight into high value targets. For end user packages, Debians "popularity contest" can be useful: https://popcon.debian.org/ https://popcon.debian.org/