Great work, very valuable info, thanks IO!

Le lun. 28 juil. 2025 à 17:02, IOhannes m zmoelnig via Pd-list <
[email protected]> a écrit :

> hi all,
>
> i've just setup a new (experimental) webservice, that shows some graph
> about trends in the usage of Pd, based on deken queries.
>
> as we all know, deken - Pd's built in package manager - can be used to
> query <https://deken.puredata.info/> for available packages.
>
> what some of you might now know is that deken sends the following
> information along with the request:
> - the Tcl/Tk version used (e.g. "8.6.10")
> - the Pd version used (e.g. "0.55-2")
> - the deken version used (e.g. "0.9.18")
> - the deken architecture of Pd (e.g. "Windows-amd64-32")
>
> all this information is send as the "user agent" string (just like, when
> you access a webpage with your favourite browser, it will send its
> version and whatnot, e.g. "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0)
> Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0").
>
> sidenote: i think myself of rather privacy aware, and do not think that
> collecting any of these data is problematic (nor is sending them from
> within Pd).
>
> also, because this is how the internet works, the web server knows about
>   your IP (and thus can make some educated guess about the country you
> are currently accessing a webpage from), and whether you are using an
> encrypted channel (https) or not (http); and of course the actual query.
>
> i've finally decided to make this data public (and somewhat useful), by
> extracting some time-series and creating nice graphs from them.
>
> these are now available on <https://deken.puredata.info/trends>
>
> the data should get updated automatically.
> (since the data already covers about 7 years, it might look like it's
> not being updated though; but this is about seeing long-term *trends*,
> rather than short-term hypes, so I don't think it is a problem)
>
>
> # data skew
>
> the input data for the trend series is searches for externals via Pd's
> built-in package manager.
> this means, that specific use cases of Pd might not show up in the data
> at all.
> e.g. some Linux users might just prefer to install externals via their
> package manager (and do all searches there), so they won't be
> represented here at all.
>
> Pd distributions that ship with a lot of externals, will not show up (as
> the users will not have a need to search for externals).
> esp. Pd-l2ork and Purr-Data do not show up, as they do not allow deken
> search (and there's some binary incompatibility, so that's a good thing)
> Plug Data does not show up either, even though you *can* use deken with
> it, because Plug Data does not directly query our web server for caching
> reasons.
>
> early versions of deken would not send a specific user agent string (and
> use just the default one of Tcl/Tk), that's why you sometimes see labels
> like "Darwin?" or "i386?" - these values are just educated guesses,
> based on the user agent string and the the time when the queries occurred)
>
>
> # absolute vs relative data
>
> the data presented is relative (in percent).
> you can get graphs with absolute values by clicking on the images.
>
>
> # oddities
>
> the absolute data is very seasonal (whereas the relative representation
> is more or less stable).
> this *might* have to do with Pd being primarily used in educational
> contexts (with holidays in between, where the Pd is little used).
> but really, idk.
>
> the other thing i found odd was that up to 2020 a considerable amount of
> the webtraffic (between 50% and 70%!) was using https.
> after that this dropped to between 5-10%.
> after some investigation i found that this has mostly to do with us
> upgrading the Tcl/Tk version included with Pd on macOS: up to Pd-0.51
> (or so), the included Tcl/Tk was able to use system installed
> tcl-libraries, and macOS comes with a library that allows us to do https.
> newer versions of Tcl/Tk can no longer use this library, and since we do
> not ship our own, this means that the traiffic is degraded to http :-(
>
>
>
> cheers,
>
> gasdmr
> IOhannes
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