I would LOVE to have access to this stuff, for many of the same reasons. Knowing what to support, knowing how safe it might be to change an API ( pretty safe if nobody uses it ).

But on the subject of implementation, I don't understand why everyone is having such difficulties coming up with a solution.

Just put an entry in wherever we keep the other CPAN configuration and do an always|never|ask config entry that starts with 'ask' by default.

(During CPAN.pm first setup)

To better understand how often and where modules are being
used, so they can be better supported, CPAN.pm can allow
modules the option of reporting back ONLY your platform
(Linux) and perl version (5.005_03) whenever that module
is installed. These support statistic are aggregated
centrally, and no other information about you is recorded.
It would be greatly appreciated if you could report your
use to help us make CPAN better for you.

Report usage and platform statistic (ASK/always/never)
[download]

If you always want to report, then it's done transparently in the back on any install. If you never want to report, we just never do it. If set to ASK ( the default ), you would get.

This module would like to report back usage and platform
statistics containing only your platform (Linux) and perl
version (5.005_03) to the CPAN statistics server at
stats.cpan.org. This support statistics are used to help
the developers which modules and platforms need the most
attention paid to them.

Report support statistics for this install? (YES/no/always/never)
[download]

This follows a couple of basic principles.

1. Default to reporting
2. Never actually report without approval
3. Make it trivially easy to permanently disable at any time
4. Make it easy for people to report.

In some theoretical forced-non-interactive run ( can we do this? ) we would just not report for that run, and ask next time we did an interative installation.

This covers both the "just fuck off and die" and the "I'd love to help, as long as I don't have to do anything" cases quite cleanly.

Putting the stats stuff into CPAN.pm is good enough for now. I guess we could theoretically allow the database to record statistics in several different catagories... so you could write a mirror log stats interface to the same stats system? Or possibly ever hook into other types of things, like debian mirror logs etc. Anyway, I'm drifting into speculation land here.

Comments?