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

[Joseph Holsten]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> Marko Käning wrote:
>> 
>> Is there a way to determine how often ports got actually installed?
> 
> 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.

Sounds a bit like the new rubygems (nee gemcutter) distribution setup. There's a minimal redirector that gives a hook for tracking, and that passes the user on to amazon cloudfront or s3 to host the actual file.

ruby gems in action: http://rubygems.org/
the man^H^H^Hcode behind the curtain: http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter

The actual bits are in app/metal/hostess.rb, which determines whether to use the CDN (cf) or static (s3) file hosting.

Frankly, I'd love making a derivative of rubygems just for end user access. Might be good for winning back some user base from homebrew also.
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