Package statistics by downloads

[Erik Schulz]

I'm interested in package popularity. I'm aware of popcon
(https://popcon.debian.org/), but I'm more interested in actual
downloads.

Do the debian mirrors track unique downloads (e.g. by hashed IP
address), and if no, why not? I can understand the privacy argument,
but arguably package downloads aren't particularly revealing? And data
could be aggregated daily, thus limiting exposure.

Boyuan Yang pointed out in the debian-www list that the "repository
mirrors" often use third-party CDNs. I assume it uses DNS response
load-balancing.
There's potential for the request log to be biased geographically, but
it might add interesting data. Another bias would be people using a
VPN, but they'd only be counted once per exit node (so you'd have some
IPs using an extreme number of packages).

Parsing the request logs could be fairly trivial:
1. reduce to unique pairs every 24h: (ip, package)
2. sum by package

[Philipp Kern]

Post by Erik Schulz
I'm interested in package popularity. I'm aware of popcon
(https://popcon.debian.org/), but I'm more interested in actual
downloads.

What would this be useful for? You only described technical details, not
why we would want to do this.

Kind regards
Philipp Kern