Mail Archives: cygwin/2005/09/30/13:36:55
On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Andrew Schulman wrote:
>
> > Debian has a package called popularity-contest:
> > http://packages.debian.org/stable/misc/popularity-contest. The
> > package installs a cron job that mails in statistics once a week about
> > which Debian packages the user has installed, and which ones they're
> > using. This allows the Debian team to track which packages (and
> > versions) are most often used. Of course this is entirely a
> > self-selected sample, since no user is required to install the
> > package. But that doesn't seem to introduce any bias.
> >
> > popularity-contest seems like a useful tool, and I wish there were a
> > similar one for Cygwin. Of course it requires server support, which
> > could be a large project. I'm not suggesting we try to implement it--
> > I certainly don't have the time. But maybe there's some simpler
> > approach.
> >
> > I maintain 14 packages for Cygwin. Some of them need almost no
> > maintenance, but others need fairly frequent updates. I don't mind,
> > but I do sometimes wonder whether anyone is using some of them. As
> > things stand now, I have no way of knowing, except by following the
> > mailing lists, if even one person has installed or is using some of my
> > packages (lablgtk2? orpie? stow?). A popularity-contest-like tool
> > would help all of us Cygwin packagers to focus our efforts on the
> > tools that are most useful to users.
> >
> > Anyone have any thoughts about how to implement such a tool?
> > Volunteers to take it on? :)
>
> We already have such a tool. It's called "cygcheck". When people post
> their cygcheck output to the list, it also contains the list of packages
> they installed.
In the usual "5 seconds after hitting send" manner, I realized that I
didn't mention that the solution below requires no server support.
> So, to implement "popularity-contest" for Cygwin, all you need to do is
> trall the recent mailing list archives for cygcheck.out (or cygcheck.txt)
^^^^^
...and this should obviously be "trawl" or "troll". Eek.
> attachments, and extract whatever info you need. :-D
FWIW, the web interface makes it very easy to discern those attachments
(though a robust script could simply search the messages and all
attachments for "Cygwin Configuration Diagnostics" and/or "Cygwin
Package Information").
Igor
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