Suggestion

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 27, 2013, at 21:41, Dan Aldrich wrote:

> I was thinking more of an interface like what sourceforge offers. Recommendations and number of d/l's a week. The comments make it sound like more trouble than it's worth.

Sourceforge tracks downloads per file, so if you want that information shown with port information, then we would need to associate files with ports.

If a port fetches a binary package, that's straightforward since the name is always based on the port name (and version and variants and OS). But if a port fetches distfiles, then it's not so simple. You might look at the distfile "zlib-1.2.8.tar.xz" and think that's easy to link back to the zlib port, but we can't generalize that; a port could fetch files of any name. "jpegsrc.v9.tar.gz" for example from the jpeg port. Some ports might fetch multiple distfiles. Some of those distfiles might not change each version (e.g. a game whose code changes but whose graphic and sound assets don't). Some distfiles might change multiple times per version (e.g. a stealth update). Some distfiles might even be used by multiple ports (e.g. py24-distribute, py25-distribute, py26-distribute, py27-distribute, py31-distribute, py32-distribute, py33-distribute which all use the distfile distribute-0.6.43.tar.gz; this is very common for language modules).

So we could track download statistics, but it would be a lot of infrastructure work to get to that point. And although it might be interesting from an educational point of view, I don't think download statistics translate into "recommendations". If I'm having problems with a port and I believe that reinstalling it will help, and I'm able to use MacPorts binaries, then reinstalling the port will cause MacPorts to redownload the binary, which would increase its download count, though I would not want other users to infer from that that I suddenly recommend the port more greatly. And there are a lot of ports that a download count would seem to suggest are very popular, yet might be something like pkgconfig or zlib that you probably need to have installed but is not something you will specifically use yourself. If you were thinking of showing a list of ports sorted by such a "popularity" indicator, with the hope of finding ports you might actually want to use, then it might be less useful than you think.