PEAR 1.4.x adoption rate

Tuesday, December 6. 2005

Update: http://pear.php.net/~greg/stats has these statistics, and will be auto-updated daily so that changes can be tracked over time.

One of the minor changes in PEAR 1.4.1 and newer was the user agent string sent whenever you use the installer to remotely access the internet. In earlier versions, it was "PHP/phpversion" as in "PHP/4.3.11". In PEAR 1.4.1 and newer, it sends "PEAR/pearversion/PHP/phpversion".

This is very helpful information for those of us who are wondering about the adoption of PEAR, and also who is using which PHP version. The first time I checked the httpd access log for pear.php.net was about 2 weeks after the release of PEAR 1.4.0, and adoption was up to only about 10%, as could be expected. Much of resistance to migrating to the new package.xml 2.0 format is that it is not supported by PEAR 1.3.x and older, and supporting both formats can be onerous.

So, to help track the actual adoption rate, I created a simple script to grab the .tgz download rate ordered by pre-PEAR 1.4.1 and post-PEAR 1.4.1. Much to my surprise, here are the numbers:

998 /home/greg/stats20051206/stats1.3
28058 /home/greg/stats20051206/stats1.4

That is 998 downloads with PEAR 1.3.x versus 28,058 downloads with PEAR 1.4.x! This is better than 96% adoption rate of PEAR 1.4.x just 3 months after its release. To be sure, the security issue in PEAR 1.4.2 and older has spurred increased adoption, but I never expected numbers like these so soon.

It should also be noted that many users simply don't ever upgrade the PEAR that comes with their PHP version, and so these numbers can't reflect actual on-disk usage of PEAR, but it does describe a useful sub-population: people who will download and install your package via the "pear install Blah" command sequence.

In other words, barring a large population of users who download PEAR packages via Internet Explorer and then install it locally with "pear install Package-1.2.3.tgz", PEAR 1.4.x and consequently package.xml 2.0 is fully mainstream, and PECL/PEAR developers can seriously consider switching over to the new format much sooner than expected.

Also interesting is the PHP versions used:

-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/4.1 stats1.4
0
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/4.2 stats1.4
46
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/4.3 stats1.4
5958
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/4.4 stats1.4
4963
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/5.0 stats1.4
7255
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/5.1 stats1.4
9836

PHP 5.1 is the most used version by active PEAR developers, with PHP 5.0 followed by PHP 4.3. PHP 4.4 does not appear to be catching on as strongly with active PEAR users.

Posted by Greg Beaver in PEAR at 12:22 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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If you think about it there is a sense to the madness.

PHP 4.x is more mainstream, its what you find on most hosting servers, but at the same time most of those hosting servers don't allow people access to pear.

PHP 4.4 breaks backward compat for a lot of scripts, so no host in there right mind would upgrade to that in fear of the backlash from there customers, Hence your low 4.4 stats.

PHP 5.x is new, its being downloaded, tested, recompiled over and over again to check for bugs, part of that reinstalling us making sure pear is updated.

I would hazard to guess that if you could count "unique" downloads your stats would differ greatly.

I think what your seeing is more of a slice of the active "developers" and not the php world as a whole by a long shot.

#1 Richard Thomas (Homepage) on 2005-12-06 06:26 (Reply)

However, when you are developing a package for pear.php.net, you only need to worry about the people who are doing the downloading, as others will simply use what they already have. What you want is to know who is actively using the PEAR installer to install packages.

For these reasons, the script that generated these statistics is a cron job, and the data will be tracked over time. I will be attempting to make a simple webpage that aggregates the information, perhaps with some pretty graphs.

#1.1 Greg Beaver (Homepage) on 2005-12-06 10:34 (Reply)

--> However, when you are developing a package for pear.php.net, you only need to worry about the people who are doing the downloading, as others will simply use what they already have. What you want is to know who is actively using the PEAR installer to install packages.

completely agree with this utterance as programmer

#1.1.1 Potti (Homepage) on 2005-12-23 05:32 (Reply)

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