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Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling



Hi, Petter:

On Tuesday 20 July 2010 14:41:49 Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> The number of submissions to the Debian popularity-contest collector
> is falling, and has done so for some time now.  This can be easily
> seen on <URL: http://popcon.debian.org/stat/sub-i386.png >.
>
> This is mostly caused by a fall in the number of Lenny installations,
> as can be seen from
> <URL: http://popcon.debian.org/stat/release-1year.png >.
>
> Anyone got any idea how to can get more machines to report to
> popcon.debian.org?  Or can there be some other problem causing the
> fall in the number of submissions?

I for one don't allow for popcon on production machines under my control.  I'm 
not going into details about why this is the case now, but that's the fact 
(on a side note I'd want to know if there's any easy way to mimic/modify 
Debian's server/client popcon enviro so it can be used to produce my own 
internal stats).

If that's the case with other sysadmins that probably would mean that main 
source of popcon machines are home systems which in turn would make 
understandable for popcon numbers to decrease by the "EOL" of a Stable 
release: home users, being more akeen to novelties are probably moving to 
more "bleeding edge" distributions, and being home users they are probably 
doing it by reformatting their systems more than by leaving old systems their 
way and using a different distro for new ones.

All in all, a look at http://popcon.debian.org/stat/sub-i386.png makes me 
think that:
1) Current reduction from April onwards is statisticallly non-significant with 
a main trend steadly growing since Aug, 2007.
2) It is i386 the one that basically is stucked which, again, it's no wonder 
since the vast majority of general-purpouse CPUs are amd64 now and, contrary 
to 'etch', 'lenny' is quite an usable 64 bit system.
3) Being both 'Y' axis related to number of installs on (mainly, I expect) 
general purpouse systems, I have to wonder why there are different scales for 
i386 and "overall".  It takes some time to understand there are *not* as many 
i386 systems as overall (with or without i386?) in the popcon and anyway it's 
impossible to know which 'Y' axis belong to what arch.

Cheers.


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