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Re: Measuring Debian progress



On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 08:04:31PM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> 
> * Total number of non-pseudo-packages that bugs.debian.org knows about.
> * Number of open bugs, in total, and for each severity, and a count of
> all non-wishlist, non-wontfix bugs.
> * Number of bugs opened or closed since the previous report.
> * Median and maximum times for first reply to a non-wishlist bug.
> * Median and maximum times since latest reply to a non-wishlist bug.
> * Median and maximum age of currently open bugs.
> * Median and maximum duration from opening to closing of closed bugs
> (total, and since previous report).
> * Number of bugs younger than a month, younger than a year, or older
> than a year.
> * Number of packages with 0 bugs, 1-5 bugs, 6-20 bugs, 21-100 bugs, more
> than 100 bugs.
> * Minimum, median, and maximum "Bogonic Quality Numbers".
> 
(Snip mathematical proof of "Bogonic Quality Numbers" :)

I would like to offer my completely worthless 2 cents here.

I think that the aggregate statistics are OK.  It will help to identify
trends in the distribution as a whole.  They are not perfect, but then
no metric really is.  For example, right now, many maintainers upload
updated packages that fix lots of problems.  Some of those fixes are the
product of a bug report and/or patch.  Howerver, many of those fixes are
the result of the maintainer himself/herself encountering something
wrong and fixing it without an associated bug report.  If someone wanted
to help "improve" the statistics he/she could simply open a bug for
every single changelog entry for an update and then upload the update
that same day.

I'm not saying that everyone, or even anyone, will do that.  However, it
is something of which we need to be aware when evaluating/analyzing the
metrics.

There are lots of other issues, but I will not go into those now.

Now, my opinion on the "Bogonic Quality Numbers" is that they should be
left out entirely.  The only thing worse than metrics is useless or
incorrect metrics.  Because of the nature of software and the wide range
of packages in Debian, any attempt to assign a quality metric to a
particular package is probably not worthwhile.

Again, that is my worthless 2 cents.

Regards,

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com

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