Improve UI for bad packages

[Rebolon]

Hi,

i found one package where it's gtihub repo does'nt exists anymore. That would be could to allow user to put an alert for that package. Atmosphere may then do a query to the repo and check if it gets a 404. Then it may disable the package or alert the package owner.

[paralin]

Interesting idea, perhaps there could be a cron that pings packages every few days or so, checking to see if they still exist.

The problem here is that noone is supposed to ever revoke access to a git repository once published to Atmosphere, as this would be catastrophic to anyone using the packages.

Thus, @tmeasday has been very very cautious about adding anything that would allow users to remove packages.

I think the best case would be to red flag a package (perhaps literally red in the list) and place a warning notice on the detail page, to show that the package is in a "broken" state.

Furthermore, when doing mrt update, users could be alerted if packages are broken or otherwise flagged.

It would be good to somehow track how many people are using a package, maybe by mrt update stats for them (though this is very impossible due to the simple git clone method of grabbing package sources). As usual, there is once again never a very good automatic option...

[tmeasday]

I'll chip in here and add the long term solution being that packages will be tarred and sent up to atmosphere so that they can never 'disappear'.

The medium term solution is to explicitly track some kind of measure of usage and use that to help users tell which packages they should be using.

[paralin]

Would it be considered "against the open-source motto" to ping atmosphere whenever a package is added?

Or can we already get this data somehow? Maybe when meteorite searches for a package on Atmosphere?

Or does Meteorite already ask Atmosphere for updated data when doing mrt update?

[tmeasday]

Right now Meteorite is very coarse in that it just grabs the complete package list of all packages (crazy, I know). It doesn't tell atmosphere anything else.

I've been pondering the following as the way forward:

1. Anonymously informing atmosphere when a user installs a package into dev (if necessary adding a user-config option to turn this off I guess).
2. Additionally tracking meteor version + package version here.
3. Creating an 'atmosphere-badge' package that allows users to opt in to having their app's proudly listed on atmosphere with a list of packages they are using, and even tracking page view counts for their app and aggregating such statistics on the package page.

I'd be into it.