On 6/8/11 4:36 PM, Vikraman wrote: > I'm working on the `Package statistics` project this year. Till now, I > have managed to write a client and server[0] to collect the following > information from hosts:
Excellent, good luck with the idea! I think that better information about how Gentoo is actually used will greatly help improving it. > Is there a need to collect files installed by a package ? Doesn't PFL[1] > already provide that ? Well, PFL is not an official Gentoo project. It might be useful, but I wouldn't say it's a priority. > Please provide some feedback on what other data should be collected, etc. In my opinion it's *not* about collecting as much data as possible. I think it's most important to get the core functionality working really well, and convincing as large percentage of users as possible to enable reporting the statistics (to make the results - hopefully - accurately represent the user base). Please note that in some cases it may mean collecting _less_ data, or thinking more about the privacy of the users. For me, as a developer, even a list of packages sorted by popularity (aka Debian/Ubuntu popcon) would be very useful. Ah, and maybe files in /etc/portage: package.keywords and so on. It could be useful to see what people are masking/unmasking, that may be an indication of stale stabilizations or brokenness hitting the tree. Anyway, I'd call it an enhancement. > Also, I'm starting work on the webUI, and would like some > recommendations for stats pages, such as: > > * Packages installed sorted by users Cool! > * Top arches, keywords, profiles And percentage of ~arch vs arch users? > * Most enabled, disabled useflags per package/globally Also great, especially the per-package variant. It'd be also useful to have per-profile data, to better tune the profile defaults. > [0] > http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/gentoostats.git;a=commit;h=1b9697a090515d2a373e83b1094d6e08ec405c02 I took a quick look at the code. Some random comments: - it uses portage Python API a lot. But it's not stable, or at least not guaranteed to be stable. Have you considered using helpers like portageq (or eventually enhancing those helpers)? - make the licensing super-clear (a LICENSE file, possibly some header in every source file, and so on) - how about submitting the data over HTTPS and not HTTP to better help privacy? - don't leave exception handling as a TODO; it should be a part of your design, not an afterthought - instead of or in addition to the setup.txt file, how about just writing the real setup.py file for distutils?
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