Suggestion

[Stephen Rasku]

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Chris Jones <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.
>
> 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 think the discovery mechanism argument is valid.  The search mechanism
only works if I know what I'm looking for.  I don't know what I don't know
but if 90% of MacPorts users install a specific port I would check it out
even if I wasn't searching for it in particular.  A better search interface
would be an improvement too but I usually just install what I know I want.

...Stephen
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