[slurgfest]

I believe that PyPI used to have some kind of popularity contest functionality that got killed.

I have to say I'm not sure that selecting the package you want to use is really the problem which PyPI needs to solve. It isn't the app store. That said, PyPI does provide a 'weight' in searches, which seems to track with popularity and freshness somehow.

[EvilTerran]

The title text on "weight" says "Occurrence of search term weighted by field (name, summary, keywords, description, author, maintainer)". So, not popularity/freshness, just a rough metric for how well it matches your search.

Indeed, PyPI might not be the right place for a community rating system -- perhaps a site could be built on top of it to provide that sort of functionality.