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[zack@cs.unibo.it: Re: debian package of the english translation]



Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>Moreover the intersection between debian user and ocaml user (i.e. the
>"debian ocaml community") isn't too large, a few tens of people, so the
>hit count wont change significatively.

There is actually no way of knowing what the intersection between Debian
users and OCaml users is.  A few days ago on the debian-ocaml-maint list it
was noted that popularity-contest (a Debian package which collects
statistics about what other packages are being used and sends them back to
Debian, where only the aggregated data is kept) is used to determine which
packages go on the Debian CDs.  I believe it was Stefano himself who said
he would not install popularity-contest because of privacy considerations,
and I would guess a lot of other people would feel the same way.

Let's look at the ways one could determine that I am both a Debian user and
Ocaml user:

  o) I am subscribed to the debian-ocaml-maint mailing list
    -- This list is for developers.  I am not a Debian developer but a
    user, and this list generates a lot of traffic that is not of interest to
    me.  I am subscribed mostly so I will know when new Ocaml-related
    packages become available, but I would suspect many other Debian
    Ocaml users would rather just check the website.

  o) I have posted to the debian-ocaml-maint mailing list in the past
    -- This is a fluke: Georges Mariano posted a message in French which
    he said anyone was welcome to translate into English, and I took him
    up on it.  Probably most Debian Ocaml users would never have any reason
    to post to the list, unless they were requesting that something be
    packaged.

  o) I am subscribed to both debian-announce and debian-security-announce
    -- Every Debian user *should* be subscribed to at least these two
    lists, but there is no guarantee that that is the case.  Some people
    just don't like mailing lists.  Note that I don't subscribe to
    debian-user because it's very high-volume, and I would guess a lot of
    other people don't either.

  o) I am subscribed to caml-announce
    -- Ditto, mutatis mutandi.

There are several other fora, such as caml-list, the comp.lang.functional
newsgroup, and the comp.lang.ml newsgroup, where OCaml users are often
found, but there is even less reason to suppose that all OCaml users can
be found in any or all of these.

It seems that logging accesses to this book is probably the best way of
counting OCaml users we have had in a long time.  So I think it's best to
accede to Xavier's wish that the book not be mirrored.  (Note that
packaging the book on Debian would mean mirroring it on not just one
website, but dozens; I'm pretty sure trying to collect statistics from
these would be impractical.)  Why not just put a link to the book in
README.Debian in the ocaml or ocaml-doc packages?  

In fact, I would like to see a Debian-specific page

/usr/share/doc/ocaml/docs/ocaml-on-debian.html

or something similar, as part of the ocaml (not ocaml-doc) package.
Besides linking to the book as mentioned above, it could give a list of
all OCaml-related and OCaml-based packages on Debian.  This can be 
deduced by using the Debian package search, but it takes a few different
searches to find everything--for instance, that ActiveDVI is based on
OCaml.  Some other links--for instance, to http://www.ocaml.org,
Gerd Stolpmann's OCaml link database, and Markus Mottl's
OCamlMakefile--could also be helpful.

Ruchira Datta
datta@math.berkeley.edu


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