[KDE/Mac] MacPorts usage statistics

[William H. Magill]

> On Dec 7, 2014, at 5:49 PM, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> ----- On 7 Dec, 2014, at 21:45, Marko Käning MK-MacPorts at techno.ms wrote:
> 
>> I didn’t imagine, that already 40% of the (contributing) users are on OSX 10.10
>> and only 30% on 10.9...
>> 
>> Interesting also, that 10.6 is still THIRD!!! :-)
> 
> Please note that none of the graphs you see on this site currently have any age
> cutoff, so they always represent the entire set of data that has been submitted.
> Once a user has shown up in this data, it will never be removed. That
> significantly reduces the validity of the graphs. If anybody has a couple of
> spare cycles and wants to work on that, the code is in svn, in its development
> branch.
> 
> As for making this more visible, I was thinking about not having a default and
> asking users to actively decide whether they want to participate or not. We
> might want to get the service migrated to MacOSForge's infrastructure (or not,
> given the current data protection laws and stuff that happens to your data in
> the US…), before we work on that, though.

In a follow-up to my earlier "gee I never heard of this before" post --

Looking at the "FAQ" on the server page: http://stats.macports.neverpanic.de/faq

I see a very excellent description of what and why.
This needs to be (at the bare minimum" linked from the "Support and Development" link on the MacPorts home page.
i.e. an entry on the Mac Ports Wiki -- clearly under "starting points" a fourth bullet:

* Submit statistics about your macports installation

Why Do You Need Statistics?

We'd like to improve our understanding of how MacPorts and its ports are used. The statistics will help us determine which operating systems, build architectures and Xcode versions we need to support and test to provide a better overall experience for our users and less unexpected failures. The stats will also help us understand how quickly new MacPorts releases or port updates are adopted and how long we should wait before we can start using new features. The variant statistics will hopefully reveal ports where variants other than the default ones are popular choices and for which ports it might be advisable to test non-standard variants when updating a port, or even which variants should become defaults. We hope to use the variants data to build binary packages for non-default, but popular variants in the future.


etc.etc.etc.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill                                                            

magill at icloud.com
magill at mac.com
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