MacPorts Statistics (was Re: usage numbers for macports vs. homebrew?)

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 11:31 PM, Clemens Lang wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> It would probably make sense to discuss and collect different ideas
>> somewhere (it could be Trac, but it's probably suboptimal at this
>> early stage of brainstorming where lots and lots of ideas could be
>> discussed, prioritized, written down, ...).
>
> I think we can keep discussing things on the lists. I moved the
> discussion to -dev and Bcc'd the -users list to keep anybody who wants
> to follow up on this informed. This really is a -dev discussion and I
> know some devs who hardly read -users.

Ouch. I actually failed to notice that the whole discussion was taking
place on the users mailing list.

> I have created a wiki page I will update from time to time with good
> ideas to prevent them from getting lost somewhere in the mail archive.
> Feel free to edit the page, add your comments, etc:
>   https://trac.macports.org/wiki/StatisticsIdeas

Thank you.

>> Just curious: if the user has two separate MacPorts installations and
>> installs mpstats on both – that would submit the statistics under two
>> different IDs, right?
>
> Yes. However, since mpstats requires a launchd plist, the installations
> would probably conflict on the path of this plist. Suggestions to solve
> this very welcome.

Depending on which names are allowed (I didn't check), MacPorts could
add hardcoded prefix, so instead of
    /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mpstats.plist
one could have something like
    /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.opt_local.mpstats.plist
    /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.Users_me_macports.mpstats.plist

(One could still get conflicting names by installing MacPorts to
prefix=/opt_local, but I guess there would be other similar problems
related to that as well.)

But that should then apply to all ports.

> Speaking of which, it might also be worth submitting
>   default_prefix: [true, false].

Interesting idea.

While it's not directly useful for port authors, it would indeed be
nice to have.

>> (It would probably be nice if MacPorts would allow installing
>> dependencies to allow running the app locally without much hassle. The
>> app needs rails 3.2.)
>
> I agree – if somebody would like to do some ruby porting, please go
> ahead.

We probably need a separate discussion for that.

Mojca