[GSoC] MacPorts Usage Statistics

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Mar 29, 2011, at 5:28 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> I would find it useful to collect this info. We discussed it briefly some years ago and rejected it due to privacy concerns. Making it an opt-in model would resolve that concern, but make the data less useful. I had envisioned this information being available to our web site, which could then show things like popular ports this week, etc.

I'll probably be accused of having a one-track mind here, but this was always something I saw naturally falling out of the binary packages / package-on-demand server we recently discussed in another thread.  If the lion's share of your user community is directly consuming the packages, and I would rather expect that to be the case if it's made as easy as *BSD's "pkg_add -r pkgname" (which does all kinds of things behind the scenes to go find the best server to talk to and grab the most appropriate version of pkgname for the user's release version / processor architecture), or through some sort of MacPorts GUI, then you have your download stats to provide this data in real-time and no real privacy issues since everybody already expects such data to be logged for lots of different reasons.

- Jordan
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