Number of download.

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.)

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT