How to find out how often a port file has been downloaded?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 17, 2010, at 18:55, Marko Käning wrote:

> I was just thinking that it might be helpful to know which ports are most actively used by the community.
> 
> Is there a way to determine how often ports got actually installed?
> 
> That would be perhaps some help when it is up to decide which ports need special care, don't you think?

Yes, I think it would be useful. When I suggested it a few years ago someone thought this would be an invasion of privacy (tracking who installed what ports) so nothing was done. So currently there isn't a good way to track this. Our server admin could look at the web server logs for distfiles.macports.org to see how often a distfile was downloaded, but this will not include users who happened to download the distfile from a different server, nor account for users who have either downloaded but not installed the software, or those who subsequently uninstalled it.

If and when MacPorts ever gets the functionality to distribute binary archives, the first part of that problem may become a little easier, since those binary archives will certainly be downloaded from a MacPorts server, and not the software developer's server. Though, if we mirror the binary archives on several servers, then we would have to collate that information from those multiple sources.

Or we could channel all downloads through a central redirection script, like SourceForge does. Thus we could count downloads (like SF), and perhaps even implement a better geolocation system for downloading from nearby servers (like SF). (Our current ping-based approach has some drawbacks.) Tracking "total number of downloads" for a port isn't perhaps the most useful, but breaking it out by version would help, as would being able to see, say, how many downloads today, in the past week, in the past month, etc. This would help gauge a port's popularity.