Hi,

Over the years I have occasionally checked the increase in downloads of both Lazarus and Free Pascal on SourceForge, but for some reason the download rates of both suddenly seem to be in free-fall! See the attached graphs.

Has Delphi Hater taken over the calculations ;-) ,the deviation seems suspiciously smooth, or have people found some other wonder tool to replace Lazarus, or are they just getting their downloads elsewhere?

Regards
Russell
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Just a speculation, but...

1. There is overall migration to web based development vs. native applications. (Hate it or not.)
2. Delphi XE2 is now cross platform to certain extend, and offers somewhat attractive new features.

There can be other factors, but those could very well be big part of what is dragging the downloads.

With best regards,
Boian Mitov

------------------------------------------------------- Mitov Software
www.mitov.com
-------------------------------------------------------

Actually I find more the increase and randomness in 2012/2012 strange. I see no reason why suddenly in 2010 fpc gets a popularity boost.

Lazarus 1.0 release will make it sky-rocket again :)

Juha
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SVN updates doesn't count on this graphic, right?

2012/7/30 Juha Manninen

There is a lot more that would need to go into the calculation.
- Downloads from SVN and Snapshots
- Downloads from other mirrors (includes Codetyphoon)

For Lazarus it also looks normal. end of 2011 was the RC and then release of 0.9.30.4. So that is the spike.

IIRC around that time the layout was re-organized, to make it easier to find the correct download ( Win, rpm, deb, dmg... AND latest release versus older release. ) IIRC it was messy before. So before that I guess more people needed several downloads.

Hi,
well, I for one almost never download them.

Lazarus I get weekly from the svn and FPC is installed automatically from the Debian repository...

But sometimes I download the fpc source to compile a cross compiler, at least that counts to the downloads

Benito

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my first impression was that many may now be pulling from SVN instead of the prepared packages ;)

Afaik sf merged to a new statistic system, and the old was overloaded and sometimes didn't register for periods of several weeks.

Could it also have had something to do with the release of DelphiXE?

2012/7/31 waldo kitty :

I don't know if it can be related or not, but my scripts to update (and rebuild) daily lazarus+fpc are downloaded several times:

for Linux: ~ 1300 times
for Windows: ~ 300 times (I use this daily)

Regards,
Kjow

Hi Everybody,

Lets just face the facts.... Such download statics are just "eye candy" for SourceForge. There is no way you can take those as a reliable source of information. It's like Microsoft trying to compare Windows installs (actually copies shipped to OEM's) to Linux Install. Nobody counts torrent downloads of Linux, nobody counts the multiple of CD's I created and shared with my friends, nobody counted the multiple times I installed a CD even though I only downloaded it once, etc...

The same applies to FPC and Lazarus projects. You can install from multiple locations: application repositories of Linux distros, official downloaded archives, unofficial daily build archive, direct checkouts from the repository, the fact that linux downloads tend to be lots of little archives and the Windows version one big archive etc etc.

So there you have it - those "statistics" are useless!!!

2012/8/3 Graeme Geldenhuys :

Hi Everybody, Lets just face the facts.... Such download statics are just "eye candy" for SourceForge. There is no way you can take those as a

Ahahah, i was thinking this graphs were some ad-picture!

Curt Carpenter wrote

Could it also have had something to do with the release of DelphiXE?

XE2 you mean? No, the codebases of the iOS port snapshot are not distributed by us (via sf.net or otherwise). They just took a snapshot, manage that internally and distribute themselves.

Its hard to interpret download numbers anyway. Its like youtube , you watch a video because it has a million of views , to later find out that it had nothing to really offer to you and living you perplexed why so many people even bothered to watch it. I think the questions should be not how many people download lazarus , but how many people actually use it . And also how many people who would love to use lazarus don't even aware that lazarus exists.?

Lazarus has reached a level of maturity I think that is time to start being promoted outside Delphi ranks. I am very new with lazarus I started using the laste few days, and I come from python though I used to be a Delphi user 15 years ago, but I certainly think that Lazarus and Free Pascal deserve a lot more glory than they are getting. I did not use it all along because from the website did not look to me like a serious product and it was not clear even from using it how mature really is. There was not that thing to keep me motivated to use it. I came back to it out of my frustration of not being able to find an IDE on par with Delphi. And I am now hapily discover that is all I wanted all along. ?

I will try to do my part in promoting Lazarus. Maybe even help improving the look of the wiki a bit. I already have in mind a few ways to make lazarus very tempting to non pascal coders and especially python coders like me. Keep up the amazing work people.?

The absolute numbers are indeed of no interest but the relative development (if it's reliable) over time might give interesting insight because one might assume that the download fraction of one source like sf might not change significantly over time.

Of course, for an OSS project the development activity is much more important ...

Florian Kl?mpfl wrote

Of course, for an OSS project the development activity is much more important ...

Indeed. I have some git commands that does that. Unfortunately that is not perfect either, because SVN doesn't distinguish between the contributor and committer. So activity by commit count is very much skewed towards those that commit other developers contributed patches etc. But the git stats can give you a year-on-year, month-on-month, most active day-of-week, or even most active time of day stats. All mildly interesting to get you through your lunch hour. :)

The total numbers are interesting for the activity of a project imo

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/stats/timeline?dates=2004-01-01+to+2012-12-31

Looks like it was indeed some fluctuation.

Florian Klaempfl wrote

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/stats/timeline?dates=2004-01-01+to+2012-12-31 Looks like it was indeed some fluctuation.

If you normalize the graph - ie drop the unusual spikes, the downloads still seem in a steady climb.

Regards,
- Graeme -

This could possibly be affected by the fact that the project has been publishing an alternative address over the last few months for people who couldn't download from Sourceforge. If, for some reason, Sf were down then people could be using that one rather than waiting for a few hours.