Re: Local system program analytics

[tomas@tuxteam.de]

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On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 08:52:54AM -0400, David Maulik wrote:
> On 7/11/2018 5:55 AM, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 09:41:39PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> >> IDK, except there is a distro-wide popcon:
> >> https://popcon.debian.org/
> >
> > Yeah, only that popcon gathers analytics on what packages people
> > install (to guide decisions on, for example, what should go in
> > the first "CD").
> >
> > Cheers
> > -- tomás
> 
> So I looked at the popcon README https://popcon.debian.org/README and much to my surprise popcon has the functionality to generate a rudimentary list of recently used programs.

[I assume you intended to CC the list -- there's much more
knowledge "out there" than would fit in my humble skull]

> For example,
> 	popularity-contest | grep '<OLD>'
> will show you a list of packages you haven't used in a while.  Note that
> this output isn't totally accurate: some packages appear "old" but you can't
> remove them because other (non-old) packages depend on them.  Shared library
> packages are particularly bad this way because it's impossible to tell when
> a library was last used.

See? I learnt something new: popcon gathers statistics on when something
was "used"... thanks for that insight.

> It looks like I still have a little bit of research to do to get the fine granular information I was looking for but I think I can start to work with this information. With the help suggestions by Tomas about SystemTap I will see if I can get what I am looking for, and maybe next time I will RTFM.

Yes. Definitely an interesting research topic. Obviously "usage"
or "relevance" in this context is at least a multi-dimensional
property.

I'd be interested in the conclusions you reach!

Cheers
- -- tomás
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