Re: percentage of popcon submitters

["Franklin PIAT" <fpiat@bigfoot.com>]

Hi

Noah Slater wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:00:04PM +0100, markus schnalke wrote:
>> I know it is not possible to _know_ the real percentage of uses which
>> submit popcon stats of all users. But I want to ask for guesses,
>> because more oppinions do likely improve the result.
>
> [..] is like this famous old problem: Nobody was
> permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the
> length of the Emperor of China's nose? [..]

I am writting a paper on popcon (ranking package usage), which isn't
finished yet.
However I have already identified the following bias:

popcon bias
-----------
**popularity-contest isn't part of any task (but prompted by D-I,
  since Etch). Therefore it is unlikely to be active on system
  installed using debootstrap (xen-create-image, etc..)
**Votes are purges after 23days of inactivity.
* Popcon statistics combines Old-Stable, Stable, Testing and
  Unstable... and maybe some Debian-derivatives.

user/sysadmin bias
------------------
* Installing popularity-contest is optional.
* Some system are unproperly configured and can't submit
  their popcon (missing http proxy ; smtp server is wrong or blocked
  by their ISP). Especially when people are travelling.
* People deploying Debian in large companies usually disable
  popcon.
* Security concerns (Do you think that people who install security
  audit tools, like nessus, will submit popcon?).
* ISPs and hosting companies disables popcon by default.

Franklin