On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 09:47:28AM +0100, Elena ``of Valhalla'' wrote:
On 2013-02-28 at 21:09:30 +0100, oliver wrote:
is it possible to see the number of downloads of packages from AUR, so that it can be detected, how much interest in a package exists?
I suspect that the use case of "download from AUR, try to build and install, (possibly even fail, or just decide that another alternative fits better), delete the package, forget about it" is not so rare, expecially with old orphaned packages.
Does "orphaned" mean old, orphaned packages? I saw some entries, where maintenance was stopped because of "not time". If such a package has 6 votes and 200 hundred downloads, it looks more accepted/used as one with 0 votes and 7 downloads. If both cover interesting topic (maybe the same topic), it's not guaranteed, but maybe more likely that the one with more votes and downloads might need a maintainer.
The system used in Debian to estimate the popularity of packages, popcon_, gives the number of installed packages, but also what IMHO is an even more important stats: the number of recently used installation.
Aha. But is that really more accurate? A new installation could mean someone who is installing Linux the first time, and then tries some packages... ...is there also a statistics about package removal?
This requires voluntary submissions, the installation of an ad-hoc program and working atime on /usr, so it is not perfect and probably not something that arch can adopt, but IMHO worth considering as a comparison.
.. _popcon: http://popcon.debian.org/
-- Elena ``of Valhalla''
Thanks you. Ciao, Oliver