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Re: package download stats?
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 10:56:03AM -0400, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> >On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >>On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 04:43:00PM +0200, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> >>>As a mere curiosity: would be possible to nkow how many times the
> >>>packages are downloaded? (maybe grepping ftp/http logs)
> >>>
> >>>OK.. don't listen to me: of course the logs are on the mirrors =P
> >>
> >>I would love to know the answer to this, though.
> >>
> >>It would be nice (tm) if setup.exe could record download stats
> >>somewhere. But, then maybe that's a violation of privacy somehow.
> >
> >FWIW, every setup run makes an http connection to cygwin.com (to get
> >the mirror list). We could also have setup connect *after* the
> >download (completely optionally, of course), and report the mirrors
> >used plus some statistics (OS, packages downloaded, etc -- nothing more
> >revealing than would be in the browser HTTP headers or the cygcheck
> >output). We could have a prominent page asking whether the user allows
> >this (yeah, yeah, like we need yet another page in the setup sequence).
> >Just a wild idea...
>
> That's kind of what I was thinking. I could generate a cgi script to
> run, if necessary but obviously it would need some kind of
> authentication to avoid abuse.
Hmm, I doubt we can prevent a determined user from faking the necessary
setup HTTP headers from outside setup... Unless we start requiring
registration to download Cygwin, which is a whole other can of worms.
> Is there something like this out there somewhere?
I doubt we'll need something particularly sophisticated... I wrote
something similar (a passthrough download logging script) a while ago -
I'm sure it can be adapted, but it will need modifications. I'll post it
if there's interest.
> Hmm. Maybe I should add a counter to the mirrors page.
> cgf
That's kind of what I was hinting at when I said "every setup run makes an
http connection to cygwin.com". The problem with this approach is that it
won't give any package download statistics, and won't be able to detect
aborted setup runs. Depends on what accuracy you want, I guess...
Igor
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