Number of download.
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 8:23 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
On Jan 19, 2010, at 2:51 PM, Christophe Genolini wrote:
Hi the list Is there a way to know how many times an R package (on CRAN) has been download ?
No, or at least not a comprehensive number. The question came up and was discussed in March last year. Search term "popular".: http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/Rhelp08/2009-March/thread.html ?The was considerable disagreement about the validity of any such number. ?This is Dirk's offering, which I assume is specific to Debian and appears to be the only data offered: http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=r-base More generally, it was stated that the CRAN mirroring mechanism does not support data collection of this sort. (But it appears that the UCLA server may be an exception.)
In a similar vein, has anyone ever put any 'phone home' code in a package, so that authors can track usage? Something in the package startup code that pings a logging server, for example? Yes I know doing such a thing without telling the user and giving them an opt-out is evil. Barry