Suggestion

[Chris Jones]

Hi,

On 28 May 2013, at 10:14 PM, Stephen Rasku <macports at srasku.net> wrote:

> 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.

I can see how for something that has a massive user base, such as the Apple 'App Store', a user based popularity poll would help to tell me something. I still maintain though that in general just because a lot of other users install something, does not mean i need to do the same, but if the statistics are large enough so you can start to discriminate within a specific category, it might be useful. This works for places like the App store, that has the massive user base needed, but i suspect MacPorts is no where near that so it really doesn't help.

I still think a better documentation system would help more, so given a few keywords a user can search macports to find what ports are available and provide what they need, is more useful to MacPorts than some popularity based polling system.

Chris 

> 
> ...Stephen
> 
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