Re: analyzing popcon data for bogus recommends
On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:09:20PM -0400, Felipe Sateler <fsateler@gmail.com> was heard to say:
> Joey Hess wrote:
>
> > It would be nice to have a list which Recommends are ignored/overridden
> > the most when installing packages, to identify Recommends that need to be
> > downgraded to Suggests. Could we derive such a list from popcon data? I
> > think it would need to be done by analyzing each individual popcon data
> > submission, so I can't do it as that data is not published.
>
> I think you need more than popcon data: popcon doesn't say which packages were
> manually installed and which were automatically AFAIK. Maybe package B is
> installed and only recommended by A, but there is no way to tell if package B
> wasn't needed on it's own.
It's true that you probably couldn't use this to find recommendations
that *should* exist, but if a Recommends is being widely ignored /
overridden (i.e., if the number of systems installed A but not B is
high), then it might be worth re-examining that dependency.
Daniel
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