Suggestion

[Chris Jones]

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.

Maybe such a list might be of some limited interest to developers, so we know which ports are most used, and perhaps more usefully those without users, but beyond that i doubt such a list would tell us much or help users. What would help users i think would be to have a much better search/browsing interface, to allow them to browse available ports.

Chris

> 
> I do like the idea of opt-inable call-home reporting about which ports are installed.  Even if a minority opts-in, it would be useful.  Ubuntu does a similar thing IIRC.  For non-end-users, it would also inform port maintainers about how many people depend on their work.
> 
> Jean-François
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> Re: Suggestion
> 
> _______________________________________________
> macports-users mailing list
> macports-users at lists.macosforge.org
> https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20130528/e647de49/attachment.html>