saving a few ports from death

[Charlie Kester]

On Tue 26 Apr 2011 at 09:34:24 PDT Charlie Kester wrote:
>
>I'm not a web programmer and don't have access to the freshports
>sourcecode. So all I can do there is make a suggestion. But perhaps I'll
>take some time to go through the list of unmaintained ports and manually
>check them against the popularity ratings on a site like freshmeat.
>It's a bit of a leap to assume that a program that's popular on Linux
>will be as popular on BSD, but it's the best data we have for the time
>being.

FWIW, here are some popularity/vitality stats from freshmeat for
unmaintained ports in the sysutils category.

Freshmeat calculates these stats as follows:

popularity = ((record hits + URL hits) * (subscriptions + 1))^(1/2)

where record hits = hits on the freshmeat project page, url hits =
clickthroughs to author's projectpage or download site, and
subscriptions = freshmeat users following the project.

vitality = ((announcements * age) / (last_announcement))^(1/2)

"The number of announcements a project has made is multiplied by the
number of days it has existed in the database, which is then divided by
the days passed since the last release. This way, projects with lots of
announcements that have been around for a long time and have recently
come out with a new release earn a high vitality score, and old projects
that have only been announced once get a low vitality score."

For comparison and to give a sense of scale, here are the stats for some
well-known projects:

Name		Popularity	Vitality

mplayer		3,995.20	45.16

MySQL		3,310.55	73.39

mutt		1,032.71	42.53

conky		173.67		3.60

exaile		64.48		3.75

In the attached file, ports listed with popularity and vitality scores = 0
are those where there is no entry in the freshmeat database.

I made no effort to verify that a freshmeat project with the same name
as the port is in fact the same program, so there might be some false
positives in the data.