[development] Download stats for October

[Greg Knaddison - GVS]

On 11/15/06, Gary Feldman <dpal_gaf_devel at 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