Inaccuracy of smolt i586 count - was 586 kernels.

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sun, 2007-07-01 at 09:18 +0100, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> Josh Boyer wrote:
> > Smolt numbers show the people that voluntarily submit profiles.
> > Download statistics show the number of downloads that hit the main
> > servers.  Neither can be used to derive estimators from the other.
> >   
> One of the question is can the figures be used to derive proportionate 
> information from the data set - ie approximately what proportion of 
> people have (say) i586 systems from the rpm point of view.  Even if we 
> can get that information out of smolt for the systems reporting to smolt 
> (and by the looks of things the question is rather more complex than 
> uname -m), are i586 boxes equally likely to have enabled smolt reporting 
> as current generation boxes....
IMO, probably not, because i586 boxes tend to be small boxes, with
scarce resources, which tend to be administrated, installed and used
differently from "big boxes".

E.g. my >10 years old i586-notebook at home uses a hand-crafted,
minimized install-set of packages, with any package which is not
necessarily required to run this box having been removed or not even
installed. As smolt is non-essential, this machine has never seen smolt.

Also, this machine hasn't seen a "full upgrade" ever since an initial
Fedora install (years ago), but had been updated/upgraded using
networked command-line yum/apt updates/upgrades.

Ralf