Slackbuild survey
 

Hello Slackers,

A bit of background. I maintain a dozen or so build scripts over at slackbuilds.org. A month or so ago, I received an email from someone who is using one of my SlackBuilds. In more than a year of writing SlackBuilds this was the first time I had any idea that someone was actually benefitting from my submissions, and this got me thinking.

Like other maintainers, I really have no idea how many people are using my SlackBuilds. Most of these programs I use myself, so I don't mind submitting my work in case they are useful to other people as well. However, there are a few SlackBuilds which I maintain but don't even use myself and I genuinely have no idea if I am helping people or wasting my time.

Really, what I would like is to have a rough idea of how many users are using my SlackBuilds. There were a few ideas once on the SlackBuilds mailing list on how to measure usage but no ideas were practical: for example, counting downloads of SBo scripts from the slackbuilds.org website is useless since most people sync the entire repository without compiling and installing each package.

So, I sat down and wrote a couple of quick scripts which will allow SlackBuilds users to voluntarily submit which packages they have installed on their computer. After collecting enough submissions, I will process the data and post it for all users and maintainers to have an idea of which SlackBuilds are being used.

Yes, it will be informal and unscientific, but it will also be interesting for me - and I guess other script maintainers.

So if anyone is interesting in contributing to this SlackBuilds survey, just run the following command:
As you can see, there is no identifying information attached to the submission: just the list of "SBo" packages that are installed on the system. If you are worried that I am recording your IP address at the same time (I'm not!), then do not run the command.

Note that the "Mozilla" argument is required as the webserver rejects connections without a recognised user-agent.

After a few days (if this has generated any interest) I will publish the results here. These will show the number of installs for each package and how those numbers break down in terms of version and architecture.

Thanks & hope to get your submissions!

Just run your scriptlet, I too have posted a couple of packages to slackbuilds so this info will be of benfit to me as well ta.

Very interesting, I have run the command and I was a little amazed to see 46 SBo packages :).

Done

149 packages were recorded =)

140 packages were recorded.

I also maintain some scripts, and like you didn't get any requests or emails about any of them for a long time. Now, I get a couple of emails a month, generally telling me there's a newer version out and that I should update my script. Sometimes, I even get patches for those scripts, which is great!

Done, thanks.

Please note though that out of 63 recorded packages I have 9 tp_smapi-0.40-<kernel-name>-i486-3 as I need one for every kernel I install (and I have the bad habit of installing many) as a hdaps dependency.

Maybe some tweaking of the script could avoid that?

This is a suggestion, not a request, as you script is useful enough as is.

Only 23 packages. I better get cracking!

Wow, people build 150 packages? And i thought my ~80 were too many.

PS. I wont be submitting mine cause my packages aint vanilla SBo ones.

I only had 28. However, I regularly use them all.

55 pkg but heavily used. Overall SBO is my 1st go to place for any extra packages I may need.

Hi bosth!

I use different SBO packages on different machines. Do you want to see them all or will I screw up your numbers by doing that ?

105 packages were recorded.

141, 63, and 43....

cheers to all for the great work.