All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

CPANSTATS

acme on 2003-02-06T10:42:57

I've always wondered what modules people have installed from CPAN, but CPAN has too many mirrors. Versions are interesting too. So I got bored last night and played around with LWP, DBD::SQLite and Sort::Versions. Here is a beta version of CPANSTATS.

It's not official in any way, and like all stats be careful interpreting them. No, it's not perfect, but I decided to get it done instead. Patches to make the client more portable welcome.

CPANSTATS

inkdroid on 2003-02-06T12:26:30

This is a very cool idea, I'm running it from cron now. I've never really understood why CPAN didn't collect these sort of statistics. I particularly liked how you saved the UID in the source code :-)

Ultra Cool

malte on 2003-02-06T12:42:05

This is ultra cool. Been waiting for this a very long time.

I know it won't happen but couldn't we display the information inside search.cpan.org?

Very interesting data

mir on 2003-02-06T13:52:37

A few comments:

  • iIt is really interesting to see the version of each module that users have installed (man, XML::Parser 2.20! That's OLD!),
  • it looks like versions are not sorted quite properly though, if I judge by the data on CGI.pm,
  • It is also quite surprising that only 40 out of 43 users have CGI.pm installed... I thought it was part of the core
  • There sure are a lot of modules in the Canon:: name space ;--)
  • who is running 5.007003? ;--)

Re:Very interesting data

acme on 2003-02-06T14:00:56

I'm using Sort::Versions and it looks like it sometimes go wrong. And now thanks to Mark Fowler, the client now has an --ignore flag, so local modules such as Canon:: don't necessarily get into the stats ;-)

Interesting reading though.

Re:Very interesting data

nicholas on 2003-02-07T10:31:48

  • who is running 5.007003? ;--)
$ /usr/local/bin/perl5.7.3-64-ld -V:perladmin
perladmin='nick@ccl4.org';

It generated a lot of warnings and a few failed regression tests while I installed the modules needed to run Léon's script. I see I'm not the only person with a 5.005_03 now, but I'm still the only 5.9.0. (Which is actually what I'm using day to day for development tasks. I don't have anything in production yet, but I suspect I'll use 5.8.0 (or 5.8.1 once it's done) for that)

Report

belg4mit on 2003-02-06T17:40:27

If you're going to timestamp the report it would be nice to include the time zone. Also, stating somewhere on the site how often the reports are
generated would be good. Finally, how are there
58 users on the current report when I just signed up and have a UID less than 58?

Re:Report

acme on 2003-02-06T18:02:29

A timezone would be useful but I'm not too worried about it being up to a 24 hours off, to be honest. The report is generated every 10 minutes, I've added a note about that. Oh, and you noticed a bug about the number of users. I used a COUNT where I meant a DISTINCT, oops ;-)

I think this is a sign that I should stop coding and instead head off to the London.pm social meeting...