On May 13, 2007, at 22:06, Norman MacIntyre wrote:
That is a bad idea. What purpose would it serve other than collecting statistics and curiosity?
Let me know when you do this so I can immediately use only fink.
I see! Well, that's two people vehemently opposed so far. :) Interesting. For comparison, it's far from unprecedented for programs to send statistical information to their developers when they check for updates. The popular text editors BBEdit and TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software do this, for example, as does the venerable dock utility DragThing. As I recall, they all ask for the user's permission before doing so, and explain exactly what data is sent; we could do that too. Even Software Update sends Apple a list of the Apple software you have installed, so that it can deliver to you a list of applicable updates. And it does that without your permission, and it's on by default, too. The purpose for collecting this data is obvious: it allows the developers to learn what kinds of machines and OS versions their users are using, which can help the developers decide where to focus their resources. In the case of MacPorts, it's fairly obvious that we will have PowerPC users running 10.3.x and 10.4.x and Intel users on 10.4.x. Maybe some 10.5.x testers too. What's less obvious is what ports people are using. And by collecting that information, we would not only help the port authors learn which of their ports are actually getting used, but also help users gauge a port's reliability. If a user is interested in a port and sees that hundreds of others have successfully installed it, there's a good chance it works. If nobody has installed it, or nobody with the user's processor architecture or OS version has installed it, there may be problems. If I wasn't clear before, I should also clarify that no personal information about the user would be stored -- username, email address, IP address: none of that. And it is not the intention to display a list of any individual user's active ports, only to sum up totals of active ports. However, I have to admit the system would need to store the lists of the users' active ports in order to compute the totals. And maybe that's a concern, since the information could be obtained by determined individuals with access. Perhaps I should explain what led to my initial email. In working on a redesign for the MacPorts web site, I thought it would be nice to include a box of popular ports in a sidebar, like so: My data here is clearly made up, but it illustrates the idea. If we tracked who installed what ports and on what processor, we could generate an accurate graph of the above, and similarly for OS versions. What I didn't do in the example above, but what I would want to do, is show only "interesting" ports. I would say ports like pkg-config and apr-util aren't "interesting" because they're merely dependencies of other ports. You wouldn't install apr-util just by itself; apr- util isn't the end goal. Other larger ports like apache2 are the end goal, and that's the kind of port I would show in the graph. If I could find a good way to identify the "interesting" ports. But perhaps this entire graph isn't so interesting, ultimately. Presumably if you're looking at MacPorts, you have a specific software package in mind that you're wanting to install, and don't need a graph of what everyone else is installing. I guess I was thinking of something like Apple's Dashboard widget download site, where they show you a list of today's top widget downloads. Same idea. If we don't do this graph, I would still like some extra info on the MacPorts home page, something to show new users what they can do with MacPorts. Something to draw them in. Maybe just a list of the most recently updated ports and their versions would do. That would be easier, too, since I can already pull that information from the repository.
