[Popcon-developers] Traces for P2P pub/sub project

[pere@hungry.com (Petter Reinholdtsen)]

[Spyros Voulgaris]
> Dear PopCon developers,
>
>   I am an assistant professor in CS at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 
> and I am running a research project with a student on a P2P pub/sub 
> system targeted at linux package maintenance. The goal is to form a P2P 
> network that will disseminate package updates to _all_ users that have 
> the corresponding packages installed and _only_ them. This would 
> substantially offload the servers, and would provide for an autonomous 
> dissemination framework in place of a hardcoded set of mirrors.
>
>   In this context, I would like to ask you if we could get hold of your  
> raw, pre-aggregated traces. That is, the listing of installed packages  
> explicitly listed _per_ _user_. Of course, any personal information you  
> may be collecting (user name, IP, etc.) can be anonymized, we just need  
> an arbitrary user ID. In fact, package names can also be anonymized if  
> necessary, although we would prefer not.
>
>   This would allow us to perform simulations on clustering users based  
> on packages they have (particularly the least popular ones), so that  
> package updates can be propagated in targeted groups. Of course we will  
> keep you up to date for any findings, and if this strives we would be  
> more than happy to see it incorporated in the Ubuntu package management  
> system!
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Spyros Voulgaris

I believe this is best discussed on the popcon developers list,
popcon-developers at lists.alioth.debian.org.

The raw data is available for all Debian Developers at the moment, and
I am not sure we want to increase the availability.  We could provide
sanitized lists of packages (only the official packages in the
archive), which has been done in the past, but I would like to hear
the opinions from the other maintainers before looking into that.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen