A 'lot' is a bit of an exageration. It seems our binary packages are quite popular, please check the download stats (apprently they have been fixed as of late on SF :)). So getting our packagers to include them would be a great step forward. Also, providing a separate package for the folks that insist to build from source (under Support Files), would solve the problem for most of the other users.
We get ~6000 downloads a day right now which is OK but not that great, given the size of the project. There are the other following sources which are not tracked:
- People following CVS - People using the source releases - Gentoo users, Debian users, FreeBSD users, FoobarLinux users who use apt-get or equivalents and so on.
I would not be at all surprised if added up, the downloads from these sources outnumbered the SF.net downloads by a fair bit. After all, Alexandre felt that keeping ./tools/wineinstall was worth it even though it doesn't do much these days simply because so many users would ask (more) questions otherwise ...