popularity package context on fedora

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 7:25 AM, yersinia <yersinia.spiros at gmail.com> wrote:
> Look interesting from a QA point of view.

How exactly is this interesting from a QA pov in Fedora?  Smolt
profiles I can understand being useful for QA because it gives us some
ability to look for commonalities when troubleshooting hardware
problems.  I'm really not sure what installed packaging information
gives up in terms of helping any QA process. Care to explain your
thoughts on this?

Debian uses popcon for a specific reason...to help in ordering the
packages on their install media sets.  I'm not sure we are interested
in that sort of help...Debian releases are a vastly different
timescale than ours. We aren't going to adapt the media contents based
on popcon every 6 months.. I don't see us making a commitment to use
the data in the same way Debian uses it..so I'm left scratching my
head on how we will use it at all.

Before I would be personally willing to commit time on seeing this
implemented I would need to know what the perceived value is.  I love
datamining...but I'm not a big fan of collecting data without first
having a stated reason for the collection of that information.  If we
are going to collect it I expect it to be used and I expect the
initial use to be stated before we start collecting it.

And more generally speaking. I'm not keen on collecting information
unless there is a potential direct benefit for users who are providing
the information.  So the reason for collection needs to be
sufficiently...user-focused...and not just because we want metrics.
Collecting the information has to be used primarily to help us provide
a better user experience or I'm going to get really pissy about it.
Fair warning.

-jef