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

[Scott Haneda]

On Apr 17, 2010, at 5:48 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> 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.

Maybe it could be a first run option?  The conf file for MacPorts is consulted on every run I would imagine, there could be a flag, report_stats = BOOL, which if did not exist, a question was asked of the user, an answer is given, and the flag is set.

It could not give valuable data as to exact counts, (some will opt out) but if the data was shown as percentages, it would be valuable as an average, to see which ports were downloaded compared to others.

This could be very valuable, if it was determined that what most think is an obscure port was heavily used, it could be looked at more closely, and perhaps made as perfect as could be as far as ease of install, up to date'ness etc.

My gut tells me Apache, php, and MySql are at the top, but who knows, that could be completely wrong.

* Maybe it would be possible to log install failures as well, if a port is seen as failing in high percentages, and the stats were of course public, someone could then preemptively look at the port and possibly fix it before the problem even hits the mailing lists or bug tracker.

I would certainly opt in, I see no reason to capture the users IP unless you want stats on location, which is probably not at all worth the privacy discussions we would then have to have.  Without user identifiable information sent over the wire, I would not even flinch were I not asked to opt into this.
-- 
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *