simple counter of installations w/o the need to manually rate ports.
It's easier and way less invasive to count package downloads. (Not that anybody is working on that, mind you.)
simple counter of installations w/o the need to manually rate ports.
Some ports can't be built as such, they'd never see a "download". Some people would dislike it (avoid unnecessary data collection) and either avoid it (e.g. by building their own packages) or just move away.
Some packages might be installed a lot, but removed a lot as well, as many people find it's not what they expected -- you will never know.
The list probably goes on, just don't do such a thing.
- "Rating the software": useless. Rating systems work in commercial markets, with all the drawbacks that were already discussed. They won't ever work for opensource software. Usecases are different, and users are free to try out whatever might solve their problem best and quickly decide. Upstream authors normally don't have "as many users as possible" as their motivation (unlike with commercial software), so there's no incentive in ratings either.
- "Rating the ports": useless. FreeBSD ports already have high quality standards, the tools to check them and committers with the necessary mindset, including reviews for many non-trivial changes. This can't avoid quality problems 100%, but if there are any, bugzilla is the way to go and much more useful than some rating system.
- "Download counts": useless. It would only ever measure downloads of binary packages. Some ports can't be built as such, they'd never see a "download". Some people would dislike it (avoid unnecessary data collection) and either avoid it (e.g. by building their own packages) or just move away. Some packages might be installed a lot, but removed a lot as well, as many people find it's not what they expected -- you will never know. Some packages are only useful to very few people, so will have a very low download count, but for them, they are extremely valuable. The list probably goes on, just don't do such a thing.
pkg query --all
?Novice users find themselves in thick fog confronted with BSD's ports tree, whose categorization is, well, sub-optimal -- to say it politely. PC-BSD/TrueOS added a more user-friendly level on top of that, but that's history now.
- "Rating the software": useless. Rating systems work in commercial markets, with all the drawbacks that were already discussed. They won't ever work for opensource software. Usecases are different, and users are free to try out whatever might solve their problem best and quickly decide. Upstream authors normally don't have "as many users as possible" as their motivation (unlike with commercial software), so there's no incentive in ratings either.
- "Rating the ports": useless. FreeBSD ports already have high quality standards, the tools to check them and committers with the necessary mindset, including reviews for many non-trivial changes. This can't avoid quality problems 100%, but if there are any, bugzilla is the way to go and much more useful than some rating system.
- "Download counts": useless. It would only ever measure downloads of binary packages. Some ports can't be built as such, they'd never see a "download". Some people would dislike it (avoid unnecessary data collection) and either avoid it (e.g. by building their own packages) or just move away. Some packages might be installed a lot, but removed a lot as well, as many people find it's not what they expected -- you will never know. Some packages are only useful to very few people, so will have a very low download count, but for them, they are extremely valuable. The list probably goes on, just don't do such a thing.
*giggle** "A user" is grammatically male (?), so I'm using "he" but that includes female users, as well.
That would be almost a equivalent to the Debian "Popularity Contest". It's used there to decide which packages should be pre-installed. FreeBSD does not pre-install packages.How about statistics of manually installed ports (excluding pre-installed) reported bypkg query --all
?
I agree, partially. The thing is, a rating system will almost never give you what you're really interested in. You don't want to see "4 of 5 stars", cause, what will you do with that? You want to see written comments, to learn how your tool works for others, in which scenarios it is used, and what might be issues with that. Seriously, how would you improve anything based on some numeric score people give, without knowing the reasons?And then a rating system is a way to provide feedback. Which in turn is known to be an important topic in the development life cycle. The existence of bugtracking infrastructure and history of Open Source software both show that many developers do care about the quality & acceptance of their work.
That is the crux! As I plan to become the maintainer of GNU Prolog (it's not in the ports anymore), I suggest: let's build an AI for that! With automated reasoning, this AI gives you some suggestions based on your use-case, hardware, other requirements, preferences (e.g. you already have gkt vs qt desktop) etc. pp. You ask: "which port does xyz", the AI answers "port A, B, and C, where B seems to fit your requirements, preferences & environment best of all, as it's the only one to integrate in Kerberos". Seriously, bare numbers are the[...] Seriously, how would you improve anything based on some numeric score people give, without knowing the reasons?
Of course I have formulated too harshly, but the type of feedback you describe can only happen in a dialogue - you have to look closely what the user really wants, what's the problem behind. If the feedback is just "tipped off", I have a sentence on my garbage dump that says "XYZ does it this way and that way, why doesn't your software". Yes, because I was dissatisfied with XYZ and wanted to have exactly that differently… And at least: With such a statistic it is however less about details, much more about the alignment in the large. And that doesn't fit to our port system.While a developer might start writing a piece of software solely for his own needs, s/he might also be happy to adjust that to similar, but slightly different needs of others. And then a rating system is a way to provide feedback.
Before you can help, critics is the way to find out the weaknesses of the current status. Even when it's not constructive critics, it is helpful to find out what we want. Then we find out what we want in a discussion like this. IMHO that's perfectly valid. Besides that, many critics in this thread are constructive. BTW, I was not only joking when I mentioned an AI for this. Let humans fill attributes for software they reviewed, integrate a good natural language processing tool (available e.g. for Python and for Prolog), then AI techniques can act as an expert guide to attend human pre-sets.[...] However, help instead of criticism would here be more advisable…
Yes, this effect exists. Nevertheless, it did not prevent numerous young new software projects to become very popular in a very short period of time. We shall not under-estimate human curiosity.Obviously a rating system would be controversial. Another downside is that new and little used--but good--programs would get pushed to the bottom of any list and struggle to gain traction. No one is going to be happy with anything one comes up with.
Cognitive science tells us: a good number of topics humans can easily overview, is 5-9 (7).I suggest someone put together a web site to do this. Categories with top five installed packages. The rest. And "new and upcoming" or "most talked about". This would require work.
Unless the data from the rating system is actionable, it simply doesn't seem worth it.
That said, I do find the debian popcon data fairly interesting. For example the following graph: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=nautilus
After all, if you don't show the relative scores of ALL competitors, you cannot call this a popularity CONTEST. Hence the importance of the package taxonomy, as outlined earlier by mjollnir.
You still belief in AI, seriously? This buzzword regularly pops up when trying to hide behind algos, creating a black box digital dominion after all...., I suggest: let's build an AI for that! With automated reasoning, this AI gives you some suggestions based on your use-case, hardware, other ...
I remember the term "crap in crap out" based on big numbers of not so bight individuals.when I search in google ... and most of the pages are crap,based on "user ratings"