Re: Distribution statistics for ELPA and EMMS

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net> 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.  If it is all about dopamine-boosting, I think a
false-positive approach would be better ;^)