How popular is MantisBT?

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aavagyan
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How popular is MantisBT?

Post by aavagyan »

Dear All,

I wonder if there is any research made on the market share of bug/issue trackers? Source Forge tells that in year 2014 alone there were 140,000+ downloads for MantisBT. Big share of this is probably re-downloads for getting updated version. Some of these are for just trying... Is it known, approximately, how many installations do exist for MantisBT?

Thank you,
Avetis
Last edited by aavagyan on 23 Apr 2015, 20:04, edited 1 time in total.
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atrol
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Re: How popular is MantisTB?

Post by atrol »

There are about 9500 registered users in our forum and about 30500 in our bug tracker at the moment.
But does this tell us how many installations do exist?
Not sure, maybe we could assume that there are more than 5000 and less than 200000 ...

Talking about myself: I am using a lot of open source products, but I registered just for a few of them in their forum or bug tracking system.

Do you know how many installations of your plugin do exist?
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aavagyan
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Re: How popular is MantisBT?

Post by aavagyan »

I agree that number of users in forum or bugtracker doesn't say much about number of active ('live') )installations. For the 5k - 200k assumption -> this is 40x ambiguity... way too much, also can one be sure that it is not more than 200k? For example, MantisBT was downloaded from Source Forge 2m times.

Actually your question is the question I was asking myself and which triggered this post here. In short, have no idea. I see that it was downloaded about 3k times in total, but these are for all different versions altogether -> so 'upgrade downloads' are also here. I was thinking that few lines of code can be added to plugin and/or to MantisBT to 'talk' to our servers to:

1. check if there is new version and to inform users if so
2. by tracking this info we will be able to understand how many live installations do exit

Makes any sense?
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atrol
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Re: How popular is MantisBT?

Post by atrol »

Checking of versions makes sense (I do it for Mantis2Go), but will it reduce the ambiguity?
Don't know, maybe from 40x to 20x?

1) when should the check run?
2) which info do you want to track? IP adress?

I remember discussions that tracking full IP adress might brake German law.
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aavagyan
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Re: How popular is MantisBT?

Post by aavagyan »

I'm imagining that mantis can check for available upgrade once a day/week (and notifies by email alert administrator - there should be some kind of switch to avoid every-day-alert situations). At your end number of these daily/weekly checks should mean number of active installations of Mantis. I think this should be pretty accurate - maybe 10-20% incorrectness due to several minor factors like:

a) people disabling such checks - not really likely - who wants to stay with old-insecure software?
b) connectivity issues (e.g. Mantis installed on LANs with connectivity to outside blocked) - again - not very likely option
c) what else?

Together with check I would send in query-string version number of Mantis so you have an idea of versions share.

I don't think you need to track IP addresses. Just have some counter per mantis version and per date. Should be enough. Or maybe check country of IP on the fly and again drop IP address info -> only keep extra country data.

If you think about repetitive checks from same IP, then you have hash IP in one-way encoding and store it too to get an idea of duplicates. One-way-hashed IP should be probably OK with German law?
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atrol
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Re: How popular is MantisBT?

Post by atrol »

aavagyan wrote:I'm imagining that mantis can check for available upgrade once a day/week
Any idea how to implement this? Keep in mind that MantisBT runs on different operating systems and also in hosted environments where users are not able to setup something like a cron job.
A bit dirty (don't like it) solution: Store the date of last check in database, check with each page request if this is more than a week ago. If yes, check for newer version.
aavagyan wrote: and notifies by email alert administrator
Not all installations have e-mail notifications enabled, thus an additional check/hint (maybe on Manage page) is needed.
aavagyan wrote:then you have hash IP in one-way encoding and store it too to get an idea of duplicates. One-way-hashed IP should be probably OK with German law?
I am not a lawyer, but I think this should OK. I know just a few lawyers and I am not interested in explaining them one way hashing algorithms :wink:
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aavagyan
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Re: How popular is MantisBT?

Post by aavagyan »

atrol wrote:...A bit dirty (don't like it) solution: Store the date of last check in database...
Looks like this is the way to implement it without access to cronjobs...
atrol wrote:Not all installations have e-mail notifications enabled, thus an additional check/hint (maybe on Manage page) is needed.
Then there should probably be some kind of setting where admin can set WHO can see this 'update is available' [DEVELPER : MANAGER : ADMINISTRATOR...]. It may not be secure to display to everyone that mantis is outdated.
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atrol
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Re: How popular is MantisBT?

Post by atrol »

aavagyan wrote:It may not be secure to display to everyone that mantis is outdated.
Hiding information is just security by obscurity. It's not that hard to find out which version of MantisBT is running.
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atrol
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Re: How popular is MantisBT?

Post by atrol »

Nice discussion about introducing version checking https://about.gitlab.com/2015/05/07/version-check/
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aavagyan
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Re: How popular is MantisBT?

Post by aavagyan »

Thank you for the link Atrol!
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