package download stats?

[Christopher Faylor]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 11:20:04AM -0400, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> That's kind of what I was thinking.  I could generate a cgi script to
>> run, if necessary but obviously it would need some kind of
>> authentication to avoid abuse.
>
>Hmm, I doubt we can prevent a determined user from faking the necessary
>setup HTTP headers from outside setup...  Unless we start requiring
>registration to download Cygwin, which is a whole other can of worms.

Hmm.  I like your registration idea.  There should be a small fee associated
with registering, too.  And, monthly dues.  And, we could add some checking
to the DLL to prevent unlicensed use.  Hmm.  I think I have an account
where people can even use their credit cards to register.  :-)

But, seriously, I just wanted to make it less than trivial to use.  It
shouldn't be as easy as opening
http://cygwin.com/downloadstats.cgi?apache to register an apache download.

>That's kind of what I was hinting at when I said "every setup run makes an
>http connection to cygwin.com".  The problem with this approach is that it
>won't give any package download statistics, and won't be able to detect
>aborted setup runs.  Depends on what accuracy you want, I guess...

Actually, after I said that, I realized that we already gather page hit
statistics.  I'm more interested in seeing what people actually are
downloading for packages, though.

cgf