Re: The number of etch installations is rocketing...
Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 12:21:09AM +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:
>> The only caveat I can think of (but there might be others) is that it would
>> not be possible to properly count installations that are using
>> corporate (or ISP's) caching proxies (in somecases those are transparent to
>> the end users)
>>
> I think that is the principal problem. I use apt-proxy and have about a
> dozen machines (counting virtual machines) that all hit that one
> apt-proxy.
>
> I am not sure how best to solve that problem.
It's probably impossible to get perfectly reliable figures for
installations. I'm sure that even the companies that sell their OS don't
have exact numbers for installed systems.
Presently the number of installations reported to popcon is about the
same as the number of subscriptions to debian-security-announce, but I
am sure there are many users of debian who don't read d-s-a and many
users, who have several -maybe hundreds- of installations and subscribe
only once! :-)
A combination of voluntary popcon as is, addition of some voluntary
hardware information and correlating this information with that from
logfiles at security.debian.org would improve the reliability of the
present data of popcon significantly.
Also with regard to privacy we shouldn't aim at a perfect counting
system, but as far as the estimates can be improved, they should.
Johannes
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