popularity package context on fedora

[Thomas Janssen]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:21 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Thomas Janssen
> <thomasj at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> - Superb information for us packagers if and how much (of course not
>> the correct value) users use the software i package
>
> It may or may not be superb information...but you haven't told me how
> collecting this information is helpful to the users of my packages.

It's not intended to be helpful for the users, but for me as packager
and upstream.

> Nor have you told me exactly how we as a project would use this
> information.

We could use the information to find out, if an app that we think is
the real deal, is really the real deal.
I bet we would be surprised about the one or other application. Well
maybe not :)

> So what if you find out that all your packages are in
> 0.01% the long tail of lowest popularity..how does that help you as a
> maintainer?  How would knowing it they were very popular than your
> thought help you as a maintainer?

That wouldn't effect my work as maintainer directly. Though the one or
the other maintainer might be more careful with updates if he finds
out that his software is used by a large portion of the community.
Well, looks like i found at least one thing that it's helpful for our
users. Oh, another thing helpful for our users: People who search for
some software, not sure which one might be the best, could start with
the most popular. I might have more ideas, it's almost midnight,
nothing more to expect from me for today, sorry :)

>> - Helps to decide if a package can be easily removed from Fedora
>> (upstream dead, no users left, good bye is no problem)
>
> 1) Popcon says nothing about dead upstream
> 2) Having zero counts in popcon does not mean unused.

1) Right, i expect maintainers to find out if upstream is dead or not.
I wasn't expecting popcorn to do it for me.
2) Right as well. Though if it's possible to have it implemented as
said via mirrormanager (sorry i'm not part of infra so i can't tell if
it's possible or not, or how to do it) it would at least indicate
there are not much users.

> You can not make effective project choices with regard to expiring
> packages on popcon data that is opt-in.  We have way too many niche
> packages which will have zero popcon counts but are still in use by
> someone.  And if you are proposing that we go further than Debian and
> have this as on by default?

Well, of course it wouldn't be only because of some popcon data, tough
it would be better than nothing (our current situation). I mean mainly
packages that are orphaned and nobody want's to pick them up due to
nobody uses it. How would we decide today for such a package, we
can't. Because we have no idea about how much users "might" be there.

Good question about on or off by default. To make sense it should be
on by default.

> -jef
> --
> devel mailing list
> devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
>



-- 
LG Thomas

Dubium sapientiae initium