Re: popcon data explanation
On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 12:35:10PM +0100, Matthieu Mazzolini wrote:
> Dear maintainers,
>
> I am contacting you to understand how to make sense of the data available
> on the popcon website, as I came to a contradiction. It looks like the data
> reported on the graph are cumulative data, as the trend is always upward.
> Yet there are periods where the number of votes declined - which should not
> happen in a cumulative count.
> Do you have an explanation for this? The number of installations is defined
> as the sum of 4 categories which includes an old and recent. Even someone
> uninstalling popcorn should still be counted in the old category, to my
> understanding, but I suspect I might be wrong on this point.
Dear Matthieu,
the FAQ says (it is a bit hidden):
The server automatically extracts the report from the email or HTTP and
stores it in a database for a maximum of 20 days or until the host
sends a new report.
The data are the sum over all reports in the database. Newer reports from
the same host supercede older reports.
The fields means:
Format
<name> is the package name;
<inst> is the number of people who installed this package;
<vote> is the number of people who use this package regularly;
<old> is the number of people who installed, but don't use this package
regularly;
<recent> is the number of people who upgraded this package recently;
<no-files> is the number of people whose entry didn't contain enough
information (atime and ctime were 0).
The word install is used in the dpkg sense. Uninstalling a package will
remove it from the inst field eventually.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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