How to know the persons who checked out my project on Google Code

Question

I have a project which is hosted on Google Code. How can I find out how many people and who checked out my project?

Answer 1

As ssokolow mentions, Google doesn't currently provide any direct stats for SVN: http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=231.

However, comments for Google pages do suggest that you can use Google Analytics within projects to track views and downloads:

zexspectrum, you can sign up for Google Analytics and then enter your Analytics account number on the Administer tab in your project. That measures web traffic only. Also, downloads show a count of the number of times each file was downloaded.

Quote obtained from http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/FAQ

Answer 2

If you mean "checked out" in the CVS/Subversion/Mercurial/Git/etc. sense, then you can't.

For the "who", checkouts are, by nature, anonymous unless the user explicitly chooses to request more privileges.

As for the "how many", I'm not 100% certain on this, but if Google doesn't provide a clearly-obvious way to check how many checkout/clone/whatever requests were made to the repository, you probably can't. It's the kind of UI they'd have to custom build, so I think they'd want to show it off.

(It also wouldn't be reliable, because the only piece of information they'd have is the requesting party's IP address, and ISPs tend assign dynamic IP addresses... which means Google wouldn't be sure whether two different IPs from the same provider are the same person or different people)

If you mean "checked out" as in "Browsed around the project's website to take a look", I remember hearing that you can tie your Google Code projects into your Google Analytics account. (However, I prefer GitHub, so I don't have direct experience with it)

Answer 3

It is not the primary goal of open source code hosting to track who or how many have checked out your code. You can offer your support and they will ask you. You can open an irc room e.g. on freenode and idle there and spread the word and they will come to talk with you. You will hear from the people who fork and improve your code.

If you fel the need to "control" in some way what happens to your code, maybe you don't want to open source it?

Another way would be to use github to host your code, so you can see who forks your code there. Github uses git, not SVN. It is still possible to keep the project page on google code but link to the github page for code hosting, many projects do that.

Answer 4

There's a "Star" feature. It says people have starred it, but doesn't give any insight into who those people are.

For a Google code project, this can be very useful. For example, if j...@ibm.com starred it, then it would shed some light on the audience, which is hardly an invasion of privacy, since they clicked the "Like" button.

Google Analytics are great BTW. Top notch! Although that's much bigger picture than simply knowing individually who +1'd or Starred it.