[cross-project-issues-dev] proposal: active eclipse installation count s

[Igor Fedorenko <igor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As you may or may not know, p2 can be configured to report feature or
plugin "download stats" to a remote server [1]. As a side note, this
reporting is done silently, i.e., without telling the user, and both
installations from remote servers and local filesystem are reported.

I would like to propose extending this functionality and in addition to
initial plugin/feature installation count, provide a way to count active
plugin installations on ongoing basis.

Here is what I have in mind

* All installation counting functionality will be moved to a separate
plugin, possibly outside of p2.
* There will be workspace preference to enable the counting, it will be
on by default.
* When the plugin first starts, it will inform the user about the
counting via a popup dialog or some other UI means and the user will
have a choice to either acknowledge the counting or navigate to
corresponding preferences page and disable counting there.
* The plugin will introduce new extension point that will allow bundles
express their desired to report active installation count. I don't have
exact details of the extension point yet, but I thin it should be
similar to existing p2.statsURI/download.stats p2 configuration properties.
* Active installation count will be reported weekly and will only
include information about bundles that have the extension point and were
active since last report (hence "active installation count").
* On server-side, active installation count will use existing
http://download.eclipse.org/stats/ infrastructure, but we'll probably
recommend using different URLs for downloads and active installation stats.

I also volunteer to implement this, provided there are no objections to
the proposed approach from Eclipse Foundation and somebody from platform
committers agrees to help me review and merge the changes.

For the reference, I've opened bugzilla enhancement [2] request yesterday.

What do you think?

[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Project_Download_Stats
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=416456

--
Regards,
Igor