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

[Craig Treleaven]

At 10:02 PM +0100 3/24/14, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>- Variants are currently submitted as a plain string:
>     "variants": "biosig + python27 +";
>   it would be a lot cleaner to use a list instead:
>     "variants": ["biosig", "python27"]
>
>- The program submits:
>     "os_arch": "i386",
>     "build_arch": "x86_64",
>   I don't know if it's just me, but what exactly is the point of
>"os_arch"? It's interesting to distinguish between ppc/i386/x86_64;
>but why is os_arch "i386" important?

One of the key variants is 'universal'.  Am I correct that we are not 
capturing the built archs of active/inactive ports?  At the moment, 
I'm inclined to think that we don't care (the non-X86-64 universe is 
pretty small and shrinking fast) but Apple has changed CPU archs more 
than once in the past so it might be useful information in the 
future.  Probably better to capture this and not use it than need it 
and not have it.

 From a global MacPorts perspective, do we care about the 'most 
popular' variants?  Eg universal, startupitem, debug, etc?  If so, I 
don't think a list of variants is the right database design.  (I am 
not a DBA nor do I play on on TV!)  I don't think this is vital 
information, however...

At a port level, I think a maintainer might want to know the most 
common variants chosen.  She might even want to know the most common 
combinations of variants.  OTOH, my ports have basically no variants 
so I really don't have a dog in this race.  What do the variant-crazy 
maintainers have to say?  ;)

Craig