Re: Distribution statistics for ELPA and EMMS

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, 13 Jul 2023 at 17:55, Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net> wrote:
>>
>> I want to start the talk with the claim that Emms is a popular music and
>> video package for Emacs. However, I have absolutely no numbers or
>> statistics to back that claim. Is there a way to find out? Are any
>> statistics collected by ELPA?
>>
>> Is there a way to answer the question: how many times was Emms installed
>> in 2022?
>
> Hey, thanks for asking that!
>
> I'm the author of an Emacs package that is in ELPA and that I don't
> have any idea how many users it has - I mean, besides the ones that
> I've interacted with - and I was planning to start my talk about it
> in the next EmacsConf by saying that it has "at least 10 users"... =/

Then again, if you go by download counts like MELPA, you will severely
overestimate the number of users, since AFAIK they do not distinguish
between downloads and updates, nor do they know if someone just
installed a package and then immediately removed it.

There was some discussion about updating the protocol that package.el
uses, in which context thinking about some reliable yet privacy
preserving method of estimating the user count would be nice to have.

>   Cheers =),
>   Eduardo Ochs
>     http://anggtwu.net/#eev