Report attribution by acquisition source to analytics from the tool

[zanderso]

The tool only has access to what is already on the user's system, and what is contained in the downloaded archive or pulled from github. Therefore, for the tool to accomplish this, the archive would need to contain the data that the tool should report. Some examples of how to accomplish this:

1. A referrer url is tracked in a query parameter, which is then injected into the archive server-side before download.
2. We create different archives based on broad classifications of referrer. The archives each contain the data (e.g. a string in a file in the repo root) that distinguishes among these broad classifications.

Alternately, the referrer at the time of download could be stored in a cookie, which the tool could then extract. I'd consider doing this only if (1) and (2) are not possible since it entails an n^3 OS/browser/browser version implementation and testing blowup in the tool.

@sfshaza2 I was referred to you for help (or routing to the right person) on the website side of things.

@jonahwilliams for thoughts.

/cc @jayoung-lee

[jonahwilliams]

Since new downloads have a special button on flutter.dev, handling this in the backend via a referrer url seems like the most straightforward. It doesn't correctly require the tool to shuffle data from the local system correct/safely

[zanderso]

@jonahwilliams sorry I was unclear. The goal is to get an acquisition source associated with tool commands and events. Website analytics already collect referrer data etc., but there is a disconnect between website and tool analytics, and the goal is to bridge some of the gap.

[sfshaza2]

@zanderso, we are woefully short on infrastructure support for the website these days, but I do have a suggestion. You might want to spin up a convo between, @johnpryan, @redbrogdon, and @dnfield. (Dan has been helping out with the website infrastructure and may have some insight, though this isn't related to what he's been doing. John and Andrew are DPEs on our team. You might want to go right to a meeting, rather than trying to resolve this here.

[dnfield]

@zanderso - the site today does not have any backend capabilities that would be able to help with this. I'm also not sure how any of this would work for people who just clone directly from GitHub.

What's the goal here? Wouldn't the referrer almost always be either flutter.dev, one of the mirror sites, or none (because they got it from GitHub directly via git clone)?

[sfshaza2]

@khanhnwin, can you weigh in on this?