Comment 11 for bug 139855

Okay, looking at LibraryFileDownloadCount, and as someone who runs a moderately successful (>10k users per month at its peak) PPA, I have the following thoughts:

There are two types of data to record - the number of people downloading individual packages (which PPAFileDownloadCount would adequately cover), and the number of people "subscribing" to a PPA by adding it to sources.list (a different measure entirely).

To track "subscribers", the easiest mechanism is to count the number of unique hits on Packages.gz in a given time period, on the understanding that the numbers will be flawed as some people have multiple machines behind a single IP (NAT, mirrors) and others have multiple IPs for a single machine (dynamic IP).

It would be interesting in any stats UI to see those stats divided by architecture.

Whilst I would be satisfied with something simple like "X people subscribed to this PPA in March" being shown, there are many interesting ways to graph historic data - for example showing downloads of a single package over time, with markers signifying new uploads of that package. People running a PPA would be able to look at their graphs & correlate them to exciting new versions or well-publicised blog posts.

As a very very rough guide to the data I find interesting, check the (hand-collated) stats on http://directhex.mfgames.com/hardy.html, which is a simple sort | uniq | wc -l job