Comment 52 for bug 139855

On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 18:55 +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> The number of downloads from a PPA is an awkward indication, because
> it's affected by:
>
> - the number of subscribers
> - the number of packages
> - the number of uploads of those packages
>
> What people *typically* want to know is "how many people are getting
> this app from that PPA". We'll have to do a little magic to get good
> estimates of those numbers from the raw data we have.

I run a reasonably popular third party repository (not as a PPA, due to
lack of download metrics), and have always found the number of
subscribers to be a relatively simple estimate for popularity - although
that might be because the packages I offer are unrealistic to download
one-by-one rather than by adding to sources.list. It's good enough as a
rough cut, anyway - it's nice to say "tens of thousands of unique IPs
have this repo in their sources.list".

It's also a measure which ignores multiple uploads of the same package
(which might be unhelpful if you iterate a lot), and just looks at the
repo as a whole. And all it needs is the number of unique hits on
Packages.bz2/gz.