popularity package context on fedora

[Jeff Spaleta]

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

> - 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.

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?

-jef