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Sorting on Chocolatey Community Repository should not rely on high download counts alone #287

Open davidem00 opened 1 year ago

davidem00 commented 1 year ago

Checklist

Is Your Feature Request Related To A Problem? Please describe.

(In similar spirit to #286) The top Popular items in so many search results of the Community Repository, especially the broad searches, have an overrepresentation of packages that are not worth installing directly, but are shown as Popular because of a download count that is overweighted because they are dependencies of other packages, as opposed to those package installations that are directly invoked by users.

The top page of the default "All Results" search is telling. Doesn't exactly look like what one imagines a "Store" to look like, in terms of what is of interest, worth perusing. (Beside items that should not be installed at all, per #286, like Flash, ActiveX, Win8 KB patches, etc) the Most Popular results have an overrepresentation of "support library" dependencies, not things that by and large are not really worth installing directly themselves: chocolatey extensions, various KB packs, vcrt, adobe air, dotnetfx rt, etc.

Describe The Solution. Why is it needed?

The Popularity metric should be reworked to subtract out the count of downloads initiated because it is a dependency of an actual end-user package (whose counts are recorded, themselves).

Additional Context

raw Download count of a package lineage would still be available, but Popularity should evolve to take on a distinct meaning, a more "meaningful" one.

Otherwise, the Community Repo browser is much less useful as a "store" worth exploring, as a place to discover new/alternative software.

Related Issues

286

┆Issue is synchronized with this Gitlab issue by Unito

pauby commented 3 months ago

Just to add some additional information on this.

The Popularity metric should be reworked to subtract out the count of downloads initiated because it is a dependency of an actual end-user package (whose counts are recorded, themselves).

(emphasis mine).

This isn't something that is possible or something that we will be adding functionality to support. When a package is installed, it is recorded as being downloaded. A package can be a standalone package and a dependency of others. It relies on context and the end-users use case for it.