On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 12:53:08AM -0800, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> Let's ponder about a question of "How important is a package?"
>
> One measure is "how many other packages depend on it?"
>
> I did some quick(*) research(**) on the Debian archive (stable, testing,
> unstable combined) and found out followings:
>
(...)
Curiously, I was thinking of doing something similar to this
myself. See below for pseudocode.
>
> Just a note to remind well known facts in quantitative manner :-) Kinda
> interesting, eh?
Yes. However, as mentioned there's one thing lacking: checking back
more than one level. I was thinking on doing some kind of stats with the
following pseucode:
foreach package X in the debian package list
check_package(X, 1)
done
check_package (X, level) {
foreach package Y that X depends (or pre-depends) on
others_dependonme(Y) += level
check_package(Y, level+1)
done
foreach package Y that X build-depends on
others_dependonme(Y) += level^2
check_package(Y, level+1)
done
# Add recommends, suggests, etc.. at lower priority
}
The results of this code should show (I'm not sure it's done right though)
which packages have a greater "weight" in Debian. I.e. they have more
impact in the distribution as a whole if they are removed, suffer critical
bugs, are orphaned, etc..
Obviously, some (source) packages while appear quite high in the list for
obvious reasons. Notice however that there is a flaw in my pseudocode: no
Essential packages will show up (since no one should Depend: on them [1]),
but we know they are essential already :-)
I believe we need this kind of stats, together with accurate information
from the popularity contest to priorise bugs, for example for Bug Squashing
parties [2] or deciding if buggy & unmaintained stuff should be removed
from Debian.
Of course, somebody might have thought of this before. ¿Are we charting
_discovered_ territory if we go ahead and try to make this?
Regards
Javi
[1] Debian Policy 2.3.4:
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s2.3.4
[2] Which currently only priorise based on packages which are priority
'base' or 'standard': http://bugs.qa.debian.org/
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