[RRFC] Expose an API for top packages by download count

[dominykas]

I'm aware this is not strictly a CLI concern, but @darcyclarke told me to go ahead with this request anyways :)

In the past, there were a couple of spreadsheets shared with the top 1000 most downloaded packages, in some cases privately (much much appreciated!). It would be nice to have these in public, on a regular basis (monthly?)

I used these to scan the node version support that these packages provide as a sort of a measure of overall ecosystem activity and the speed at which it updates to latest node, esp LTS, versions, there's some findings/stats in nodejs/package-maintenance#200. The goal there is to see if we can help the maintainers stay up to date and test in latest node versions.

But I'm sure other people would also find more uses for that list.

I know there already exist a download count API, and it is very flexible, but getting the list of top packages would require querying each existing package one by one and sorting afterwards, which would be quite inefficient.

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Side note: I'm not sure it is obvious whether issues or discussions should be used - possibly the README needs some updates?

[ljharb]

This would be great.

I'd love to see live-ish-updated lists, ideally all with configurable time periods, of:

• N most downloaded packages
• N most downloaded package authors
• N most depended-upon packages
• N most dev-depended-upon packages