I don't think its that usefull because makepkg is only used at compiletime. Those authors could have a look at pkgstats for more accurate statistics.

That's the point, at compile time the software is downloaded from their websites, so we could just let them know from all the people who download their software how many of them are Archlinux users.

This is clearly for the authors of software which they are in AUR (at least more than for ABS packages), not for the Archlinux community as pkgstats is, although it will give for the authors more awareness of our existence. The needed change isn't hard to do.

And pkgstats isn't mandatory for every Archlinux user.

I'm against this. Pacman/makepkg are supposed to be tied to any distro, so this would have to be done in the packaging step. Also, I have many doubts that this would be particularly useful for software authors or that users would enjoy that this information gets given everytime they download something.

I recall this isn't my idea, just the idea of the author of a program I've contacted. If it's useful for him, maybe it's useful for others.

If there is a problem with privacy concerns, pkgstats is more intrusive than this imho (although you could argue the data is collected by Archlinux servers and used by Archlinux TUs, but the mere act of collecting that data is worst for privacy than this imho: you could make a profile of the user, though it's only identified by its IP); since there are more linux/bsd users using wget (which already has it's own user-string) than windows or mac users using it. And browsers like firefox tell with the user agent to webservers you are using linux and your architecture by default.

If makepkg is used in other distros, that's a good point, but it's a change in a config file. Other distros could change that in its packaging steps.

The only problem I see is some authors could actually disturb Archlinux users, hindering them to download its software, but this situation even happens with the default wget user-string; something you can see, if you google a bit.

Well, I think this will be my last comment "defending" the idea. I'm not the interested party after all.

Well, you could see clearly I'm not a native English speaker, so just wanted to say sorry for all the English mistakes I've made (since I'm reading them right now).

pkgstats is voluntary, this wouldn't really be that way, so you would have to opt-out of sending "private" information (although this is hardly that severe).

With pacman, we set the user agent because the downloading is much more integrated in the system. I'm a bit wary about doing this with makepkg because the downloading part is not the main point of the script, and the fact that it is just a script.

It also presents problems when people use alternate downloaders. Do we add a user-agent string to a default wget config line, along with adding an example curl one? I just don't find this all that useful as downloaders are super easy to swap in and out of makepkg.conf.

I'm closing this. It is simple to do if people want to add this themselves.