[R] Number of download.

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 8:23 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> On Jan 19, 2010, at 2:51 PM, Christophe Genolini wrote:
>
>> Hi the list
>>
>> Is there a way to know how many times an R package (on CRAN) has been
>> download ?
>
> No, or at least not a comprehensive number. The question came up and was
> discussed in March last year. Search term "popular".:
>
> http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/Rhelp08/2009-March/thread.html
>
>  The was considerable disagreement about the validity of any such number.
>  This is Dirk's offering, which I assume is specific to Debian and appears
> to be the only data offered:
>
> http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=r-base
>
> More generally, it was stated that the CRAN mirroring mechanism does not
> support data collection of this sort. (But it appears that the UCLA server
> may be an exception.)

 In a similar vein, has anyone ever put any 'phone home' code in a
package, so that authors can track usage? Something in the package
startup code that pings a logging server, for example?

 Yes I know doing such a thing without telling the user and giving
them an opt-out is evil.

Barry