[Slackbuilds-users] Web stats?

[Niels Horn]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Erik Hanson <erik at slackbuilds.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:38:24 -0400
> B Watson <yalhcru at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A thought... Have been looking at some of the builds I submitted for
>> 13.0 that didn't make it into the 13.1 repo (mostly because they need
>> to be patched for 13.1's newer gcc). Going through them, patching,
>> will eventually be resubmitting them, but I can't help but wonder
>> whether some of the more niche-market ones are even being used
>

I myself maintain some packages that are difinitely "niche-market",
like the mainframe emulator, TRS-80 emulator, etc. But if even one
person downloaded it, I'm happy that I did something useful :)

> I've never seen anyone complain that the site has too many scripts.
>
>> - A lot of users rsync the whole tree, and when they want to build
>> something, just untar their copy of whatever.tar.gz from their local
>> tree.
>
> Indeed. Approx. 9/10ths of our outgoing bandwidth is rsync data. There's
> no realistic way to filter out what's being downloaded for the purposes
> of build/install/use.
>

That number surprised me at first, but I rsync the site myself, since
I like to build a lot of things just to take a look.

>> - "Number of times downloaded" doesn't really tell us whether the
>> downloaders are still using the package (they might have tried it,
>> decided it's awful, removed it within 5 minutes).
>

This happens to me a lot. Not that I find programs "awful", but
usually I try out several similar programs and only keep the one I
liked most - for some reason.

> Maybe sbopkg could include an "opt-in" option that sends some anonymous
> usage data back to their site. That's just an idea, but it's probably
> as close as anyone is going to get to a real, useful counter.
>
>
> --
> Erik Hanson
>

In the end - statistics or voting or whatever - the resulting numbers
cannot be accurate and might even be counter-productive.
I don't remember seeing any other distro having a similar counting or
voting system - at least the ones I visit regulary.

--
Niels