Re: Anything wrong with med-bio?
yn Wed, 21 Nov 2007, Charles Plessy wrote:
To my surprise, boxshade, which had close to 100 installations recently,
dropped strongly.
Well, sometimes popcon results are hard to interpret. It might be that
there was some kind of cluster installed that added say 64 instances of
installed boxshade (for whatever reason) and got it deinstalled later on.
Well, I admit that looking at the graph does not look like a cluster
effect because in this case you would observe a steeper slope.
After investigation and comparison with packages like
perlprimer and emboss, which are still rocketting,
It might be that those packages are installed without using med-bio
which is perfectly possible.
I found out that the
decrease affected a subset of our packages, that have in commont to be
installed by the med-bio metapackage. Indeed, med-bio decreased as well.
Perhaps we should try to find some correlation between given Debian-Med
talks and installations of med-bio. I see two peaks in 2007 and I had
two chances to talk about Debian-Med
http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200705_ltb/index_en.html
http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200706_debconf7_med/index_en.html
It might be that several visitors of the talks tested, played around
and deinstalled med-bio.
Although there is no indication that there could be a problem with
med-bio, I just wanted to let you know this fact in case you noticed
something particular. I have the feeling that many users do not report
bugs, and that the decreases can indicate problems.
Well, I really like the idea of observing popcon stats to draw some
conclusions about the usefullness of our packages. On the other hand
we are doing here statistics with quite small numbers. I would start
wondering about problems if the number of installations would have
crossed the borderline of 100 and than dropped below 50. We should
know from the people reading the list whether this is some effect
caused by a cluster (as guessed above) or whether it is something else.
For insance, if you
look at clustalx, the two decrease periods coincide with buildd gizmo
and segfault bug.
http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=clustalx
just in case,
This sounds like a reasonable interpretation but I'm a little bit reluctant
to make a science of popcon results because there might be varios different
influences we just can not know and the absolute numbers we are talking about
are quite low.
Kind regards and thanks for sharing your observation
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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