Hi Johs, ----- Original Message ----- > the flaw in measuring 2.x adoption by Github issues and requests for > informal and paid support is that all these data points are pain > points, > not signs of error-free operation. > The in-production part of CouchDB based systems is not easily > measured, as one of the qualities of CouchDB has been zero downtime. > The lack of data should just add caution before using the kill > switch.
Point taken, though there are still plenty of problems and bugs in 1.x, and we're not seeing people come and ask for help with them in Slack, IRC, on these lists or privately. Perhaps a better approach is to see the number of downloads of CouchDB tarballs and packages, yes? We have access to this through our bintray.com hosting and the apache.org mirror hierarchy. For the former, see graphs here: https://imgur.com/a/nI2bvnx Graph 1 shows downloads of the Windows package, which has the longest download history available. Based on this we can see that the very large majority of downloads of CouchDB is 2.x since the 2.0.0 release, and that downloads had a palpable increase with this new version. 2017 still had ~10% of downloads as 1.x releases, but by the time 2.1.0 released last July, this became background noise. With the release of 2.1.1 (see graph 2), 1.x accounts for less than 5% of the downloads. Graphs 3 and 4 are the same data for the Mac downloads. Total downloads are only 20% of the Windows downloads, but the overall trend of data is the same. In fact, on OSX, in 2018 downloads of 2.1.0 alone exceed downloads of 1.6.1, even after 2.1.1-1 was published. While I was at it, I checked download number for the new .deb/.rpm packages (though we only provide 2.x packages). In the year the packages have been available, we have ~20k downloads each on rpm and deb, with debian users upgrading much more aggressively to 2.1.1 from 2.0.0 than rpm users. See graphs 5 and 6. There is the possibility that Windows downloads are skewed, since I expect this is more frequently in use on desktops rather than servers. With 1.x packages removed from many distributions due to the age of SpiderMonkey 1.8.5, our best bet is to look at tarball downloads from the Apache mirror sites. Apache Infra logs requests through the web that redirect people to their nearest mirror; this is the best data we have. The exposed file: https://www-us.apache.org/dyn/stats/couchdb.log only covers the last 30 days; I've asked Infra if they can provide logs farther back for a better statistical sample. Based on this file, using this program: https://gist.github.com/wohali/899a6d6c316d2f52c7a9cec0b3b41580 the count of downloads is: 0.8: 7 0.9: 18 0.11: 6 0.10: 6 1.0: 34 1.1: 41 1.2: 50 1.3: 19 1.4: 20 1.5: 23 1.6: 127 1.7: 201 2.0: 28 2.1: 717 As expected, there is a higher 1.x count here, but it still accounts for less than half of the downloads, even when taking into account archived versions < 1.7. If we only consider 1.6, 1.7, 2.0 and 2.1, 1.x downloads account for 30% of tarball downloads. These download numbers are further dwarfed by the binary downloads above. Turning to those older distributions, installations of CouchDB 1.x on Debian have dropped significantly in the last couple of years: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=couchdb Ubuntu's data is skewed, due to the inclusion of CouchDB 1.1(1.2?) in very old versions of Ubuntu One that is no longer used. Even accounting for that, the data is similar, showing less than 500 active users of the package: #Format # #<name> is the package name; #<inst> is the number of people who installed this package; #<vote> is the number of people who use this package regularly; #<old> is the number of people who installed, but don't use this package # regularly; #<recent> is the number of people who upgraded this package recently; #<no-files> is the number of people whose entry didn't contain enough # information (atime and ctime were 0). #rank name inst vote old recent no-files (maintainer) 1209 couchdb-bin 835764 453 834984 18 309 (Unknown) Both distributions have removed CouchDB from their repos in the latest release. The very old Ubuntu Launchpad CouchDB PPA with 1.x packages has an API for querying the information, but I've not looked into it, because apparently it can take hours to gather the stats and I'm unconvinced the data will vary significantly from the easier-to-consume paths shown above. https://ftagada.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/ppa-stats-initial-impressions/ Conclusion: Based on this information there is poor evidence for the hypothesis that CouchDB 1.x is being downloaded with any sort of frequency. Of course, this does not mean that people don't already have it downloaded and are continuing to use it on already provisioned computing resources. > Yes, I am volunteering for a hypothetical 3-man team. I understand > that > such a team would not pull resources allready committed to 2.x, so > the > hope would be that presently non-actice developers could be persuaded > to join an effort with limited, but a forward-looking scope. Noone > should > be expected to work for a branch that is doomed to die. > If the PMC support for and effort to keep 1.x alive can be expressed > clearly, I can develop a discussion paper for a hypotetical team as a > start. Thanks for the offer. Before writing up a full paper, what would your first 3 acts be? -Joan
