Re: percentage of popcon submitters
Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:24:58 +0100
> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> wrote:
>
>> Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
>>
>> >> Surely, it must be possible to get an estimate of the number of
>> >> downloads of important packages and security updates? I know these
>> >> downloads also are requested from mirror sites, but at least for the
>> >> official mirror sites their relative activity must be known?
>> >
>> > How do you map the number of downloads to the number of users or
>> > machines?
>>
>> It would establish an upper bound of well-administrated debian machines,
>> I think.
>
> No, merely the number of installations which is not the same, clearly.
>
> Chroots can be entirely temporary. I regularly hammer the mirrors to
> create test chroots last a matter of minutes. (Usually in a different
> architecture each time, hence a proxy isn't much help.)
>
> It's not just chroots either - don't forget issues of local mirrors.
> Download measurements cannot take account of whether the downloaded
> file is actually installed or merely copied into another repository.
It would still provides an upper bound, but the local mirror exception
is a good point. So the number derived from security.debian.org
statistics would be 'an upper bound of the number of well-administrated
debian installation that do not use local security mirrors'. I assume
this number is correlated to the number of real debian installations
(although I'm not sure we have a good definition of "real" here?).
Merely the number of distinct IP addresses downloading a particular
popular update from security.debian.org at least once would be
interesting.
/Simon
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