Re: Estimating number of existing Debian users

[Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp>]

Hi,

> I'm sorry, but the number is wrong as I replied to your blog post[0].

Thanks for the repost :)
 
> > This is a wild extrapolation, so the number is pretty unreliable,
> > especially the usage of popcon is too small to be significant;
> > however, I do not know of a better way to estimate the number of
> > Debian users.
> 
> Exactly as I wrote, and there's a big difference between Debian
> installations and users. We've more users than installations, estimate
> (not measure) installations is easier than estimate number of users
> (direct or indirect). With direct I meant 'getent'able users and
> indirect somebody browsing a website running Debian.

These two values are much harder to predict, and I agree it cannot be
known from the apt-listbugs value nor popcon value.  That's a very
good point which I wasn't clear about.

> Btw, are you trying to estimate the number of installations (not
> users, no way) or reach the exact number? Reading again the two
> paragraphs above it isn't clear. Based only on your blog post content,
> the answer would be exact number and that's also impossible with the
> data on the table.

This was an attempt to estimate from given information available from
Debian resources, not relying on third party information (such as
Netcraft, linuxcounter, etc..)


regards,
	junichi
-- 
dancer@{debian.org,netfort.gr.jp}   Debian Project