Fight bugs, not FESCo

[Mike McGrath]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2010, Eric Sandeen wrote:

> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 03:48:15PM +0100, Thomas Janssen wrote:
> >> On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Aaron Faanes <dafrito at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I agree to almost everything you wrote.
> >>
> >> <snip>
> >>> - Allow maintainers to see number of downloads by users who have
> >>> opted-in to share that data. If not number, then a simple range.
> >> <snap>
> >>
> >> *That* would be awesome. Because besides of bugs and some guys in IRC
> >> who tell you that they like the software you package, you have no
> >> feedback if your software is in use at all. Of course speaking of
> >> maintainers like me who owns not the big desktops. I have some smaller
> >> packages and the E17 chain.
> >
> > Debian has a thing called PopCon:
> >
> > http://popcon.debian.org/
> >
> > Rich.
> >
>
> Could smolts.org collect package data as well?
>
> Might be a little outside the scope of the thing...
>

People ask this all the time and I said no to everyone except one
developer who finally I guess gave up and didn't do it.

It looks like popcon has like 93000 profiles?  Smolt has 1.8 million [1]
and even at that level without package data we have horrible performance
issues.  If I were to add packages with my knowledge of db's, smolt would
become useless within a month because the thing would be completely
unavailable.

If someone *really* wants to do this and knows more about databases then I
do, I'll help them through it.  It's a high bar though and not to be taken
lightly.

	-Mike

[1] Yes I know the stats say 765,000 right now.  I was in the middle of a
multi-day db upgrade that took several days longer then I thought and got
caught in our infra freeze for the alpha...  It'll be corrected after the
alpha ships :)