introducing deken trends

IOhannes m zmoelnig via Pd-list <[email protected]> Mon, 28 Jul 2025 17:02:10 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.multimedia.puredata.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

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
--
please do not CC me for list-emails

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