On 9/5/24 10:36 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:
All, Devs,
I was curious about the frequency that packages in extra and core are installed by Arch users. Is that metadata captured anywhere and is there any way a user can query it?
What sparked this curiosity is that I follow the package feeds closely checking for version changes I may have to deal with on a production box. In doing so I learn about many packages I've never heard of before. That posed the question of how frequently all packages are installed by Arch users.
Package use, popularity, whatever you want to call it can provide a reasonable metric when comparing between two packages that provide the same feature in determining which to investigate first or install. It would also give a metric of the impact of a developer retiring or orphaning packages.
Does any install frequency data such as that exist for packages in extra and core? Or could it be garnered by whatever data is captured from the mirror system?
Hi, As far as I'm aware from a mirrors standpoint there is no way of knowing the frequency of installment as all packages are mirrored from T0 and then spread out to other mirrors that are out of our observation. Since T0 is just accessed by T1s, that is not a useful metric. Even if you'd get logs from other mirrors, those are just downloaded packages which you have no idea if they are installed or just downloaded for whatever reason. Regards, Arun