Launchpad Finally Gets PPA Usage Stats; Might Also Get A PPA "Heat" Metric

The Launchpad API was updated yesterday, finally bringing PPA statistics. For now, the stats can only be accessed by using a Python script, but they will probably be implemented on the actual website soon, especially since Mark Shuttleworth is also interested in these stats. He actually posted a comment on Launchpad, asking for a "heat" metric for PPAs:

5 flames: top 1% PPA in the past 6 months
4 flames: top 10%
3 flames: top 25%
2 flames: top 50%
1 flame: top 75%
damp squib: less.

Just count all downloads across all archs and releases equally, but only count them for the latest version of any package in there, so you can't fudge it by rapid-fire publishing.

The PPA usage statistics data has not been updated yet - it has a lot of catching up to do so you can't see any real stats for now, but for fun, I've created a simple python script (actually just modified some of the examples posted @ Launchpad as I don't know Python) to get the download statistics for a PPA.

To use, download the script and modify it with the PPA you want to get stats for, install python-launchpadlib:

sudo apt-get install python-launchpadlib

And run the script:

python ppastats.py

Remember: the PPA usage data is not ready yet so the script may return very few to 0 downloads for most packages in a PPA.


For more info on this, read the comments for bug #139855 @ Launchpad