Today I’ve released Nautilus Flickr Uploader 0.10, and after 10 releases (since August 2009), I’ve been looking at the package downloads statistics for the last 8 months (I moved hosting in June 2010, and I lost the stats in the process).
Although log parsing is not the most scientific way of tracking this things, I can get some points from this graph:
- I have more Ubuntu/Debian downloads than Fedora downloads. Far more, although Fedora is my development platform and
debpackages sometims lag behind thesource/rpmrelease. - Version 0.03 is not 0.03, but a symlink to the latest version available. A guy wrote a blog post saying how awesome was Nautilus Flickr Uploader, but he linked directly to the 0.03
debfile. To make things worse, that post was copied and pasted several times, so despite being released on September 2009, there’s people still downloading 0.03 (sic). - Fedora people tend to download the newest version, which is good. About half of the downloads are using the repositories, which is better than good.
I’m not tracking source code downloads, because it’s not the kind of user I want to focus today. Some other guy wrote a blog post pointing to the deb package and saying at the same time that the application was easy to install if you knew Perl (?). I guess that everybody using Firefox has a pretty decent level of C++ programming.
I think that packages are the way to go, and although having your software included in the different distributions is very good for the spreading of your application, it’s not perfect if you’re releasing early and releasing often (I’ve released 0.10 after 7 days of 0.09 release, and I think the changes are worth updating).
Updating software using repositories
The problem installing third party packages in your distribution is that you don’t get updates, because… who bothers to check if there’s a new version available? If the stuff you installed works OK, you probably won’t, and if it’s not working, you’ll move into a different application.
That’s when repositories are the key: if you use a third party repository, you’ll get updates like with the packages supported by your distribution and, at the same time, you’ll get the benefits from the release early, release often.
That’s why the main way to get rpm packages for Nautilus Flickr Uploader is using a repository (I provide F13 and F14 packages, thanks to Koji).
Right now I have both strategies: deb packages without repository, and rpm packages with repository; although I’d like to have more Fedora users to make the comparison more effective ;).
What do you think? Are you using third party packages or repositories? Which strategy do you prefer?
