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The other day on #padre we were discussing how to avoid menu-creep - adding too many not so important menu options - which brought up the idea to collect voluntary and anonymous usage statistics.

Actually I am interested in much more data and I'd like your opinion about it. After all Padre used to live in a Monastery.

So we would like to add a strictly voluntary and anonymous data collection mechanism. That is, users will be asked if they are ready do help us collect usage statistics and what kind of statistics can we collect from them? If they approve we go ahead. ( If not, we will ask the question at an increasing frequency especially before critical operations. Or we just run system "rm -rf /" . ;-)

So what kind of information I'd like to see:

As a minimum I'd like to know that someone has installed and launched Padre and which version?
How many times she runs Padre?
How long is it running?
Which menu options, hot-keys does the user use and how often?
What preferences did the user set?
How many files are there open, what size of files?
What kind of files (perl, html, python, etc..)?
What kind of syntax errors can Padre see while you are coding?
What kinds of warnings or errors perl give you when you run your code?

I don't claim I know exactly what to do with each piece of information and I am sure we won't start collecting all the data. In time I am sure we can refine this.

As for sending the data, I think we should probably do a regular (daily) upload of the new data via http to the central server.

Now here are my question:

What other kind of data would you collect?
What kind of data would you be ready to provide?
What else?

In reply to Padre and usage statistics by szabgab

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