Suggestion

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

On Jun 11, 2013, at 6:46 AM, Jan Stary wrote:

> On May 28 21:36:58, jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> On 28 May 2013, at 08:12 PM, Jean-François Caron <jfcaron at phas.ubc.ca> wrote:
>> 
>>> While download statistics might not be a good system, I do concur that MacPorts very much would benefit from having a "discovery" mechanism by which users find out about useful ports.  Searching is nice, but it's not discovery.  Some kind of "top ports" list (however implemented) would be useful, imho.
>> 
>> Personally, I fail to see how a 'top ports' list would tell me much. The ports i find essential are likely very different from others, so i don't see how using some sort of a list showing the most used ports would help me in any way in choosing new ones to install. Some ports likely have a low user base, but never less are critical to those that need them, such as more esoteric ports from the science section.
> 
> +1
> 
> let's say it turns out people download firefox a lot.
> then what?

Say we need/want to update a port that has many dependents; knowing the install base of the dependents could help us determine the support ramifications of different update approaches.

ie: moving apache2 install files to conform to porthier. Are 10 or 10,000 people likely to hit the MP mailing list asking what the bleep happened.


Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)