Re: http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/ popularity sorting?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Claus Hindsgaul]
> Since popcon does contain statistics for this (the "votes"), we have
> the choice to use that instead.

No, popcon do not really contain reliable statistics for this.  The
vote is very inaccurate, and do not show how often all packages are
used.  For example library and manual packages are never used
according to the vote, because the regular cron jobs accessing the
package files would render the vote count completely useless if they
were.

At the moment, the vote count in popcon can be used to compare the use
of packages with files counted, for example program packages with
files in bin/, but it can not be used to compare other packages like
library packages.  This is the regex currently required to match to
get a vote count:

   m{/bin/|/sbin/|^/usr/games/|\.[ah]$|\.pm$} or next;

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen