Message-ID: <d8ad40b51001191230w6e6cc8b1gc5ea95086979aeaa@mail.gmail.com>
Date: 2010-01-19T20:30:35Z
From: Barry Rowlingson
Subject: Number of download.
In-Reply-To: <E1824758-B4FE-4E4A-B0EE-03EC2D7B7E8A@comcast.net>
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