ports.macports.org & improvements

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

First of all a huge thank you to Clemens for having deployed
    https://ports.macports.org

What would be nice to do next (probably not in the scope of GSOC)
would be to increase the visibility of the website & get more people
submitting statistics to make it more useful.

(1) I promised this back in April and never did it, but we should
attempt to revive the discussion about the general website rework,
from both the content and design point of view. Constantin already
spent some significant effort on the following demo:
    https://constantin-p.github.io/macports-site/
    https://github.com/constantin-p/macports-site/issues/1
and it would be nice to think of the best way to integrate
ports.macports.org to the main website (which might require changes on
both sides: main site + ports site to link back to the main page).

(2.a) Getting more users aware of statistics submissions & invite them
to participate.
Every two weeks (?) we ask users something like "You didn't run
clean-up for more that two weeks, would you like to do it now? [yes,
no, never ask me again]". Could we do something similar for statistics
submissions? It doesn't need to be every two weeks, once after the
initial installation and once every major upgrade might be sufficient
(and if users answer "never ask me again", they would of course never
be bothered again).

(2.b) At the moment we only run a "cron job" for submissions once per
week, never check whether it succeeded and if the computer is not
online at that moment, submission doesn't attempt to be made until
next week (when it might easily fail again). It would be nice if we
recorded the time of last successful attempt and maybe check more
often. If the last successful submission was less than a week ago,
don't do anything. If it's more, try to re-submit. This could be
either a timed command, or maybe it could be checked at the end of
"port install", when users would likely be online, rather than in the
middle of the night when computer is not even awake.

(3) Default / negative variants
Umesh pointed out (I didn't double-check) that we store negative
variants to the port registry, but never actually use that information
(there's no easy access to them from macports base helper functions;
he apparently used that for "port migrate").
On temporary development version you can see an example of variant counts:
    http://ec2-52-34-234-111.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/port/ffmpeg/?tab=stats
It would be nice if we could tell what variants users enabled or
disabled manually, but we would need to submit this information, so we
would need to extract it first.
Could someone else familiar with the base comment what could or should
be done? How much effort would be needed to support at least some
basic information?

Thank you,
    Mojca