Given how often we actually would get around to using pkgstats for a cleanup, I was thinking once a year to wipe the slate clean and do a drive for more submissions.

I just figured it would give us some neat trends, rather than flat usage.

just stating the obvious that to be able to view trends we should wipe out the database every so often as the cronjob would run.
Just not sure how it would actually reflect the average usage. How many users have both the cron deamon loaded by default and the pkgstats package installed? Are these numbers enough to come up with reasonable conclusions?

Isn't cron on by default? That's the reason I suggested this - cron is on by default, install pkgstats and now you have everything.

Regarding trends: I was working under the impression that Pierre maintains not only usage, but the date of submission, allowing us to visualize time spans. I may be wrong though

yes cron is on by default but from the rc.conf files I see on the forums every now and then it is my impression that a lot of (most?) users remove it.

as if Pierre maintains also date of submission I don't know. Guess Pierre is the one to answer that.

As well as providing a cron-job with 'pkgstats', how about moving it to 'core' and adding it as a dependency for 'pacman'?

This might sound extreme, but it'd help to give Arch developers a truer indication of: how many people use our wonderful distribution; the popularity of each package.

In addition to what I've written immediately above, perhaps we could instruct 'pacman' to call 'pkgstats' once in every hundred executions. A random number generator could be used to achieve this and we'd only need to add two lines of code to 'pacman'.

This method would overcome the problem of 'pkgstats' not being called when users haven't loaded 'cron' or have moved their monthly cron-job directory elsewhere. What do you guys think about all of this?

pkgstats is an Arch specific construct and pacman aims to be distro agnostic. So pacman will not be calling pkgstats.

Thanks for the reply. Since more people seem to be watching the related forum topic, I've posted my response there: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=499775

Forcing people to use pkgstats is not a good thing. I don't want to do that.

When invented some time ago, pkgstats was created to get some statistiacal information for a short period. For long term usage I need to rewrite the server side backend. At the moment it just counts absolute numbers; no history or trend is possible atm..

-1. I don't think we should automate statistics-gathering. Perhaps an install message and an entry in cron.d/monthly that does not have +x permission? That way a user would have to manually chmod it before it was active.

status? I think we should close if nothing has changed.