popularity package context on fedora

[Thomas Janssen]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

- Superb information for us packagers if and how much (of course not
the correct value) users use the software i package
- Helps to decide if a package can be easily removed from Fedora
(upstream dead, no users left, good bye is no problem)

At least two points, so rock on and implement it please :)



-- 
LG Thomas

Dubium sapientiae initium