Philip Kaludercic writes: > Adam Porter writes: > >> [I just noticed this message from a few months ago.] >> >> On 7/16/23 21:25, Richard Stallman wrote: >>> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] >>> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] >>> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] >>> We could have two options for downloading, one which is "for a real >>> user" and one which is "for periodic testing". >>> The only difference would be that the former increments the user >>> download count and the latter does not. >> >> I like this idea, but it seems like it would be hard to enforce. It >> could even go the other way, i.e. have Emacs send a query string or >> header when installing a package manually, which could be logged and >> used to filter the download logs later. But even that might be harder >> than it seems, e.g. if I call a command like: >> >> emacs --eval "(package-install FOO)" >> >> ...to non-interactively install a package into a local directory for >> testing, how far, and in how many places, would some kind of flag need >> to be propagated to end up in the server's logs? > > There is an inherent unreliability in these kinds of statistics that has > to be accepted. The question is therefore are issues like these > significant or would they skew the results. This has to be considered > under a false-positive and a false-negative approach, depending on what > we want to measure. How are these numbers going to be useful? This can't be a measure of "popularity." Say, for example, the package "git-commit" is 11th most downloaded package on MELPA. Is it really popular? Few people install it explicitly. Only one package depends on it, which is Magit, a super popular package. So git-commit is automatically installed as a dependency when Magit is installed. And also, packages that get more frequent update are downloaded more than whose update less frequently. So its indeed possible for a less popular but frequently updated package gets more downloaded than a mature well written more popular package. And also there are straight.el, Elpaca and Quelpa guys who don't use the ELPA at all. > If it is all about dopamine-boosting, I think a > false-positive approach would be better ;^) > OK... --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- (while t (package-install 'eat) (package-delete (cadr (assoc 'eat package-alist)))) --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Soon: Eat is the most popular terminal emulator. xD -- Akib Azmain Turja, GPG key: 70018CE5819F17A3BBA666AFE74F0EFA922AE7F5 Fediverse: akib@hostux.social Codeberg: akib emailselfdefense.fsf.org | "Nothing can be secure without encryption."