Does the repository server collect information about installs? It seems to me 
it should and package and version support decisions based on that information. 
Without that information there is great potential to waste resources doing work 
which will never be used.

In the early 90's I was a big advocate for buying binary FOSS packages as 
compiling them for multiple platforms was not cheap unless it was done during 
idle time while waiting for another job to complete. I routinely did this on 
other systems while waiting for a compile and test to complete on the platforms 
we supported for our package.

As a practical matter, distribution of builds of FOSS was out of scope. I just 
did the 6 platforms which used our NFS server for our convenience and 
efficiency. No one asked me to do it. I just did it and everyone was very 
pleased that I did.

In order to better manage resource allocation of 3 people, I implemented a 
usage logger which collected usage data via UDP from all the business 
affiliates in a major oil company for the package we supported. Once a month I 
generated plots showing program usage by affiliate and cumulative usage 
worldwide. That allowed management to allocate resources to programs in 
widespread use and ignore programs only used by the scientist who wrote it. One 
individual was *very* noisy. It was extremely useful to be able to show he was 
the sole user and had run the program 1 or 2 times in the last year. As he had 
written it, he was quite capable of adding the "important" features himself.

I do not suggest collecting per use data, but per install data seems entirely 
sensible.

Reg
  
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