Re: How popular is Debian (popularity contest)
On Sun, 2004-08-08 at 22:19, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> I came across this website http://popcon.debian.org/
> It shows statistics how many people have installed a certain package on
> what kind of system etc. etc. If you want to anonymously report what
> packages you are using you have to have the popularity-contest package
> installed.
> I guess many people using Debian have it installed. That's why I was
> amazed that the number of submissions is only around 6000.
> Are there only around 1000 debian users on the world (assumption 60% of
> them sends reports)
>
> Also 9 architectures have 20 or less submissions. 3 architectures have
> only 1 submission. Seems to me supporting all these architectures for
> all the developers is quite some burden just to help out a few users.
>
> Is there something wrong with my reasoning???
I think a better way to measure the number of debian installs would be
for security.debian.org to count unique IP addresses. While lots of
people won't have popularity-contest installed, a large majority of them
will be getting security updates...
Of course this would not count users of testing or unstable, which don't
have security updates. And it won't properly count people using
apt-proxy, etc. or behind NAT firewalls. But it would be a start.
>From what I remember of using the new debian-installer a few months ago,
it really encourages people to use popularity-contest, so maybe the
number of installations of popularity-contest will grow.
Of course its purpose is mainly to determine which packages should go on
which CD images of Debian, so as long as the set of people with
popularity-contest installed is reasonably representative, it doesn't
matter if the numbers are not large. As someone said, debian servers are
probably under-represented, as good sysadmins won't install unnecessary
software on production machines. I hope the people determining the CD
package order take this into account...
Cheers,
Simon
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