Comparing cvs downloads of drupal and all contrib modules isn't worthwhile for a number of reasons: 1. They're used for different purposes - drupal cvs is primarily for testing where as cvs versions of modules tend to have the most bugfixes and functionality. And as you state, drupal-cvs is often (usually?) updated directly though CVS rather than a download. And this October -cvs version downloads could simply reflect additional testing on Drupal 5.0 module ports. 2. They reflect different versions - drupal-cvs for October is known to be Drupal 5.0, but for modules -cvs might be a 4.6, 4.7, or 5.0 version. 3. One is unitary (Drupal) whereas the other is aggregate (modules). There are about 550 modules tagged for drupal-4-7 (thanks dopry), so I don't see a 16-folder difference in cvs downloads as an inherent disproportionality. There are better ways to examine what you are getting at: a. Compare cvs / 4.7 download ratios on a per-module basis and examine the distribution for modules with both variables. This would be easy with a bit of string manipulation on the download list. b. Count the percentage of modules that set cvs/head as their default download on d.o. (or do a db query). c. Look at the distribution of time between the latest -cvs release and DRUPAL-4-7 release on a per-module basis, though this would need to be tweaked with the shift to Drupal 5.0. Great stats summary otherwise - the reasoning behind this issue (but not necessarily the conclusion) was the only thing I disagreed with. -Chris Greg Knaddison - GVS wrote:
On 11/15/06, Gary Feldman <dpal_gaf_devel@marsdome.com> wrote:
Greg Knaddison - GVS wrote:
... +++Downloads by tag:
4.7 439049 cvs 27294 4.6 11190 4.5 234 5.0 46
To me this indicates that module/theme maintainers need to do a better job of branching their modules especially when combined with the following chunk: I don't follow this. Is the reasoning that 11190 downloads for 4.6 is high, suggesting that people have to use 4.6 modules for 4.7 installations? There were nearly 2000 downloads of the drupal-4.6 tar file, so the ratios don't support this (439049 is roughly 20 times the number of 4.7.3 downloads, while 11190 is only 5 times the number of drupal-4.6 downloads). I'm not sure this reasoning has any validity, so I'd like to know more about your conclusion.
Sure - let me give my logic in longer form:
27,290 downloadeds happened for files (modules, themes, core, translations) for the CVS revision. Yet when you look at the numbers just below this section that you snipped out there were only 1,316 downloads of Drupal Core CVS.
So, given that there were only approximately 1,316 installations of Drupal CVS, why are there so many downloads of Modules from the "CVS" tarball?
1. A module that had a 4.6 branch and has had work in HEAD for 4.7 but doesn't have a 4.7 branch. That's the most likely scenario that I've encountered. A perfect example is the leaf theme: http://drupal.org/node/20591/release HEAD works with 4.7, but results in a download that counts in the CVS pile. That theme should ideally be branched for 4.7.
2. A user went to the project download page, saw the cvs tarball as the default release, and they grabbed it even though they have Drupal4.6 or 4.7 installed. This is something I have encountered pretty often in the issue queue, but it seems less likely. I can't find any examples of these at the moment, perhaps the recent project work changed that, or perhaps michelle fixed them all. Either way...it's a possible scenario.
3. Some other slight variation on these two. For example, a variation on scenario 2 is that a user goes to the project page, sees the 4.7 version as the default release, sees "view other releases, checks them, sees a CVS release, assumes that the CVS release will work with 4.7 and has updates not available in 4.7 so they download the CVS version. I have encountered this scenario in the issue queue as well.
Now, if I understand your point it's that people download multiple modules/core which is a good point.
If we use 4.7 as the baseline there were 39855 core downloads, 329387 module downloads for a ratio of 8.26 modules downloaded/core download.
If we look at CVS there were 1316 core downloads, 20478 module downloads for a ratio of 15.56 modules downloaded/core download. This looks to me like a disproportionate number.
Finally, looking back at 4.6 there were 3629 core downloads, 5419 module downloads for a ratio of 1.49 modules downloaded/core download. However, due to the relative lack of popularity of 4.6 in general and the fact that most 4.6 installations are in maintenance mode (note the popularity of the PHPTemplate engine for 4.6) I think we should ignore 4.6 and only use 4.7 as the baseline.
So, perhaps that is faulty logic, but there it is. I'd be happy to hear other explanations for the disproportionate ratio between module/core downloads for CVS.
Regards, Greg