Some apt Repo Statistics

I host a small, personal apt repo, primarily for my own use and convenience as I work on preparing packages for inclusion in Debian, or more recently hosting unofficial backports of Debian packages. I don’t usually pay too close attention to the access logs, but as I’ve recently updated a couple of packages I thought it might be interesting to see how many other people are utilizing my repo.

First up, openrct2 is a package that I maintain in Debian. It was accepted into Debian last December, so since then I’ve only been hosting backported packages for buster/bullseye. Debian has a popcon service, which as of this writing reports about 40 installs. However, popcon is opt-in, so it likely doesn’t capture a wholly accurate view of how many installs a given package has. After I published the latest backport of openrct2 to my repo, I observed nine other distinct downloads in the following week. Cool – other people are using it!

The big surprise for me, however, was the popularity of the MakeMKV packages that I initially worked on and then have been assisting Ben Westover with. I published updated packages last Friday, and a week later there have been 77 unique downloads! That’s way more than I thought there would be, but it’s also really cool to be able to see so many people finding my packaging work useful.

Going forward I’ll be keeping a bit of a closer eye on the popularity of my apt repo, as clearly more people have been finding it useful than I had originally imagined.