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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