Re: [Monotone-devel] [RFC] M.T. phone home

[Marcel van der Boom]

On 8 jun 2006, at 10:45, Nathaniel Smith wrote:

> But the basic problem is this: it would be really useful if we had a
> way to get more metrics on how people use monotone in real life.  For
> instance:
>   -- what commands do people run most often?
>      (maybe they should have the shortest names, and appear earliest
>      in the docs, and get the most optimization effort)
>   -- are there commands that people often run in quick succession?
>      (maybe there should be sugar to make that more convenient)
>   -- what percentage of merges involve conflicts?
>   -- what percentage of merges involve messy tree-rearrangement
>      conflicts?
>   -- do selectors actually get used?
>   -- what are the real-world statistics for trees?  E.g., for
>      benchmarking, it can matter a lot how many files are in a tree,
>      how deep the directory structure is, how many files are changed
>      per commit, etc., and we don't know what numbers are actually
>      representative.
> ...and so on.
Would it also be possible to see if people follow the 'intended  
philosophy'? I mean, on situations where monotone barfs something  
about tmp directories, orphaned nodes, rename conflicts and what have  
you, do they bail out and start over or do they 'use the force' to  
get back on track?


The above reminds me of the openlogging 'feature' that bitkeeper had/ 
has. Apart from what you described above, the main usefulness (to me)  
was to have a 'unified activity' view of the repositories. If people  
were working on stuff locally, experimenting, but not pushing yet, it  
showed me that and I was able to contact those people saying "hey, i  
see you're working on something which is also done by those two guys  
there, perhaps you want to set up some form of communication"

In general, the sending of the 'activity log' has a balance which  
tips over to the 'monotone hackers' on short term, users presumably  
benefit from the conclusions drawn from those logs by having a better  
monotone longer term.

If there would be a way, perhaps by not only sending the activity log  
to a 'monotone place', but also allowing users to set up their own  
'project home'. Having information about your project's activity  
without having to go through the trouble to teach everyone how to  
'serve' monotone (so revs can be exchanged directly) can be very useful.

marcel

--
Marcel van der Boom
HS-Development BV               --   http://www.hsdev.com
So! webapplicatie framework  --   http://make-it-so.info

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