MacPorts Statistics (was Re: usage numbers for macports vs. homebrew?)

[Craig Treleaven]

At 11:06 PM +0100 3/18/14, Rainer Müller wrote:
>On 2014-03-18 22:09, James Berry wrote:
>  >  * More integrated web app with better access to ports, etc.
>
>Which could also be integrated with the upcoming statistics gathering in
>the next MacPorts release.

As I understand it, the statistics process arose 
in GSOC 11, right?  Is it pretty much as 
described at:

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/MacPortsStatisticsGSoC2011

There is a (short) thread about the proposal here:

https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2011-March/014384.html

which suggests it is inspired by Debian's Popcon 
tool ("Popularity Contest").  The Popcon home 
page and a page for libpng (chosen at random) are 
at:

http://popcon.debian.org/
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=libpng

Is the above accurate?  I understand that Popcon 
tracks the last access time (atime) for files in 
a port and that our implementation does not.

From what I can see, our tool will not gather 
whether a port was Requested or not.  I think 
that's a key data point.  Some libs will get 
installed very frequently as dependencies but 
will seldom be requested.

Also, this is implemented as a weekly launchd 
job.  What happens if there is a problem 
somewhere between the users machine and the 
server receiving the data?  Does the user job 
abort gracefully?  Try again?  What is the user 
wants to get rid of MacPorts and deletes 
/opt/local/*.  My experience is that launchd will 
_never_ stop trying to run the missing job and 
will spam the Console log with complaints about 
it.

Do we have a sample statistics page for a port/all ports?

Craig