Download stats for various versions and platforms

[aslakhellesoy]

As a product owner of Cucumber I'd like to understand more about the distribution of various platforms (JVM, Ruby, JavaScript, .NET etc) and versions that are used in the wild.

This can be done with a combination of:

• Scripts that scrape various package manager stats
• Including version/platform information in the message protocol and provide (a) service(s) where users can send their results (for example a report generators)

/cc @tooky

[davidjgoss]

npm has a public API specifically for this https://github.com/npm/download-counts, e.g.

https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-month/cucumber

[aslakhellesoy]

@davidjgoss most package managers have some sort of API to get download stats, but comparing those stats between platforms doesn't make sense.

This is because each package manager uses different caching strategies, so while the numbers might tell us Ruby has 3 times more downloads than Java, the number of people using Java might be twice as high as people using Ruby.

This is why I'd like to be able to collect real usage data. The main motivation for this is to understand better what platforms we should put more effort into supporting.

[aslakhellesoy]

/cc @tooky