Reading package momentum and maintenance signals

The watchlist starts with Monolog, Laravel Framework, Symfony Console, PHPStan, PHPUnit, Pest, Rector and Doctrine ORM. It stores download counters and tagged version metadata. The public popular list supplies additional discovery candidates.

Compare like periods and establish a baseline before describing growth. Download totals include automated and transitive installations. Package requirements, release frequency, maintainer response and abandonment are separate signals; none alone proves safety.

Composer v2 metadata is compressed through inheritance between version records. The collector expands that representation before reading each version's PHP requirement. A new minimum PHP constraint is migration pressure, not proof that applications already upgraded.

The first observation is a baseline. It does not support a week-over-week growth claim yet.

Related: adoption methodology, tool release example.