[Haskell-cafe] How to estimate number of downloads of GHC or Haskell Platform?

[Gershom B]

The ubuntu popularity contest (from people who opt-in to report their package installs) has 11963 installs of GHC. (http://popcon.ubuntu.com/) I don’t know the right factor to scale that to “total installs across ubuntu” or better yet “total installs across various linux distros” but I would be curious to know.

We may want to keep better and more uniform logs than we do (infrastructure volunteers welcome!). However, a crude grep on what we do have (going back through March 17) yields 91857 hits to urls prefixed "platform/download/2014.2.0.0/" So one can scale that out over a longer period of time if necessary. I’m sure that this is a low estimate as there is some interaction with our CDNs.

The downloads page itself on haskell.org, over that same 52 day period, has 29456 hits (suggesting to me that many people probably hit the /platform page and access the installers from elsewhere than the haskell.org/downloads page itself).

I don’t have statistics available for the minimal installers hosted elsewhere, including MinGHC and GHC for OS X (and in fact one disadvantage of the latter being hosted on github is that download statistics are impossible). Perhaps fpcomplete, which hosts MinGHC, could provide statistics for that.

Hope that helps.

—gershom

On May 6, 2015 at 10:25:10 AM, Norman Ramsey (nr at cs.tufts.edu) wrote:
> For a review, I'm trying to get a rough estimate of how many times GHC
> or the Haskell Platform have been downloaded. Although I'm sure I've
> seen this information graphed over time at workshops, my web-search
> skills are not turning up anything. I'd be quite happy to get an
> estimate to within a factor of ten.
>  
> Can anyone suggest any sources, or a good way to estimate this number?
>  
>  
> Norman
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