Tracking the number of downloads

[Scott Haneda]

On Oct 23, 2010, at 1:33 AM, Takeshi Enomoto wrote:

> The developer of gcc upc is curious the number of
> downloads through MacPorts.
> 
> It is not possible to count the installed ports by users
> but as a proxy we could count the number of downloads of 
> source tar balls through the MacPorts mirror sites.
> Is there a way for a port maintainer to know a figure
> how popular the port is?
> The figures could be listed on the MacPorts web site or
> displayed with a port subcommand.

How about a new feature added to ports, where the portfile has a command such as:
track-stats {
	option-1
	option-2
	option-3
}

Now the maintainer of the port can decide what they want to do.  One option could be to post to a MacPorts server that does tracking, another could post to the maintainers server, and the last could use raw commands to post as you desire.  Something like that.

The port prefs/conf file would determine if this feature was allowed to work or be gracefully ignored.  Default would be off for all non defined cases of the config file.  Any new installs, non upgrades, would get the new setting to start tracking.  Any upgrade should maintain the old settings of privacy coming first.

Just a thought.
-- 
Scott (* For off-list contact, replace talklists@ with scott@ *)