[Catalog-sig] Thoughts on more detailed stats

[Thomas Lotze]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:33 AM, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote: ...
>> I think it would help to ask what the goals of the statistics are? The
>> statistics are presumably used to answer some questions. What are those
>> questions?
> 
> A/ is my project that provides end users script but also modules that can
> be reused by other apps, is:
> 
> 1/ being installed by end users explicitly via easy_install, pip or a
> direct distutils install
> 2/ just pulled as a dependency for another project
[...]

These questions are already too technical for judging how the stats should
be computed. I think what consumers of the stats actually want to know and
what the stats therefore need to be able to answer in the end is more
along the lines of:

- Has my project ever been used by other people? Is it worth my time to
  make a nice distribution of it?

- Is my project still being used? How many people get mad at me if I make
  incompatible changes?

- How many hits does my project get compared with "the competition"?
  What's my "market share"? Am I cool? ;o)

Not that I'd find that stuff overly interesting myself, but unless there's
a really good reason to add more details to the stats, I'd strongly prefer
the interaction with PyPI to remain as simple as possible.

-- 
Thomas