GSoC 2019 [Collect build statistics]

[Craig Treleaven]

> On Mar 23, 2019, at 6:26 AM, Arjun Salyan via macports-dev <macports-dev at lists.macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 3:15 PM Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org <mailto:mojca at macports.org>> wrote:
> I would use the first definition: number of users currently having the
> port installed. It might be pretty common to have to reinstall the
> same port multiple times (maybe just for debugging / development
> reasons) and we don't want to count the port developer 20 times. If
> the user uninstalled the port, it's equivalent to me as never having
> it installed in the first place.
> 
> Thanks. But in that case what would be considered as number of installations in a particular month? Suppose, the first weekly submission contains port P in active_ports, but during second submission(in the same month), the port is uninstalled.
> 
> One way would be to have it consider the number of users having it in active ports on the last day of the month or on 15th.
> 

Our existing installation stats are, to be kind, a mess.  

If you look at:

http://stats.macports.neverpanic.de <http://stats.macports.neverpanic.de/>

It says: "Our statistics know about 239 users in total. Last month (February), 49 users have submitted statistics.”

Since there are two submissions per month, does that mean there were 49 unique reporting systems (one user may have more than one system; I do) or half that amount?

What does “239 users in total” mean?  Does that mean 239 unique user identifiers over the past several years?  How is this a helpful statistic in any way?

See:

http://stats.macports.neverpanic.de/os_statistics#os_platform <http://stats.macports.neverpanic.de/os_statistics#os_platform>

It says all 239 reported platforms are Darwin.  So this appears to be the conglomeration of all reporting over the past several years.  This explains why the charts for OS X Version and MacPorts Version contain so many old versions.  All versions ever reported are being added together--which is useless.

Look at:

http://stats.macports.neverpanic.de/installed_ports <http://stats.macports.neverpanic.de/installed_ports>

It says "Most popular port this month (March) is mpstats with 57 installs.”   Since we are late in March now, it appears that most systems have submitted a report and the number of reporting users has gone up from the 49 in February.  I guess.

Note that the port ‘mpstats’ must be installed in order to report.  Thus, it MUST be the “top port” for the month, every month.  Not helpful information.

The top list includes items like libffi, gettext and expat.  Generally, these are installed as dependencies of over things that users have actually chosen to install.  However, we don’t capture whether a user “Requested” a port or not.  I would really be interested in a list of top Requested ports.

Currently, I can’t access the installation statistics for individual ports.  As I recall, there are significant problems with the current reporting.

I think good installation stats could help us understand our users and how they are using MacPorts.  I can’t recall if we ever had a design document that identified the sorts of information we wanted to capture and report.  

Craig

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