| Re: [ide-dev] Eclipse IDE popularity: Snyk report vs download stats |
Hi Mickael
I'm not at all sure how well the download stats relate to reality...
I was looking at the download stats a couple of days ago to try to determine how dead MoDisco is...
so on
https://dev.eclipse.org/committers/committertools/stats.php, I
entered download.eclipse.org, modisco-Update, from 2019-01-01 to
2020-10-10, daily download stats per file. Partial displays below.
It shows small values, almost like a background level, but why did 10/26 of the 1.5.0.zip downloads occur on Xmas day?
Why is 1.5.0M3.zip still being downloaded - albeit trivial number of times.
Looking at a more active project ATL-Update:
why only 7 download in 35 days of 2020 compared to 5711 in 2019?
Changing to total per file, we see the top 20 entries with between 103 and 193 downloads. OK a very even spread ?? good, but most of the entries are milestone builds. Why are so many 'users' sticking with an even spread of milestone builds? Surely this is an indication that the 'users' are 'spiders' or 'mirror polling' rather than true users.
Changing to EMF-Update we see results that might be big enough to
escape the 'background' noise. The top 5 entries are the most
recent 5 releases 563 to 185 downloads. Plausible, but the sixth
entry is 2.6.zip; a 10 year old release; why is this still so
ridiculously popular? It doesn't correlate with the last Eclipse
3.x release; It is a download from the latest organisation of EMF
downloads that did not exist until 8 years after the release was
superseded; more traditional downloads were emf-xsd-update.
----
My examples above are all on smaller numbers and so the associated issues may be swamped by the larger numbers for the SDK, but I think there are sufficient uncertainties to have doubt as to whether the numbers tell us what we think they do about 'users' rather than 'bots'.
Regards
Ed Willink
2. The Eclipse download stats are not reliable...