On 19:02 Tue 10 May     , Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto wrote:
>  * lack of statistics
> 
> Another issue raised by some developers is the lack of statistics so 
> we can know how many people use arches and so arch team members can 
> have any feedback about their work. I agree that numbers are 
> important, so I'd like to have a way to collect statistics about 
> Gentoo's usage. I've contacted Sebastian Pipping (sping) about this 
> because of his smolt project, but haven't heard back from him yet. 
> Does anyone have any suggestions about this? Does anyone want to work 
> on this?

I've got access to some of our web logs, which gave me an idea. What if 
we estimate how many installations were successfully completed on each 
architecture by looking at visits to the last page of the handbook? This 
won't be a perfect measure for various reasons, but it's better than 
nothing.

Here's one day's worth of visits to part 11 of the install guide, which 
is the last page with actual content (adding users, cleaning up):

    190 x86
    150 amd64
     85 sparc
     83 ppc
     82 hppa
     59 ppc64
     54 alpha
     17 mips
     11 arm
      8 ia64

The reason non-x86/amd64 architectures are so close to x86/amd64 is that 
people using "alternative" archs rarely fail to install. The x86/amd64 
numbers start out about 2–3x higher at the beginning of the handbook, 
but most of them don't complete it.

It's tough to know how long an installation sticks around, but that many 
new installs per day is pretty impressive.


-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.com