How many users does Fedora have?

[Alec Leamas]

On 01/12/14 12:57, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 01, 2014 at 12:38:24PM +0100, Reindl Harald wrote:
>>
>> Am 01.12.2014 um 12:36 schrieb Alec Leamas:
>>> On 01/12/14 12:29, Reindl Harald wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Am 01.12.2014 um 12:26 schrieb Alec Leamas:
>>>
>>>>> Lets face it: I envy those who can measure the usage from a download
>>>>> counter or so. Can we have something similar?
>>>>
>>>> no - you have no clue which mirror was used without explicit tracking in
>>>> YUM/DNF and given the noise about the recent Firefox changes you won't
>>>> even consider seriously tracking inside the distribution
>>>>
>>>> additionally downloads are meaningless - many setups with more than one
>>>> machine have their local mirrors and a download can be 1, 10 or 50
>>>> installed instances
>>>
>>> I hesitated when writing my initial message, didn't include this:
>>>
>>> Feedback why this is impossible isn't really helpful here, most of us
>>> are aware of the limitations. Given that we agree on the overall goals
>>> (?), useful input is what can be done, and how
>>
>> it is helpful because the fact it is impossible will shutdown that
>> discussion because - well, it's impossible
>
> The question becomes, is any numbers better than no number?
>
> In theory, we could get an idea of how much a package is downloaded. Mirror are
> syncing all the content, so they introduce a baseline while user is what
> introduce the variability.
> So if we were to be able to gather logs from a) the main repos + b) some
> volunteer repos, we could get a trend.
> The number would of course not be exact as you mentioned but we could get an
> idea, something like: we have 132 mirrors and my package was downloaded 133
> times, which potentially means there is one user (me) using that package.
> There might be more, but if no-one ever reports a bug and we see the number of
> download is basically equal to the number of mirrors, we can get an impression
> that this package isn't used by many people.
>
> So we come back to the question: is any number better than no number at all?
> Even to get a trend?
>
Yes, I think so. Even a bad number can be used for trends and comparisons.

That said, let's not limit this discussion to the "download counter" 
concept. There are other approaches, perhaps some kind of reporting app 
which send reports on installed sw to a central server, like the abrt 
thing. Or something else, which I cannot imagine.


Cheers!

--alec