Getting popcon back in shape

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2006 at 10:55:21AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> I personally find that popcon.ubuntu.com is a very useful resource for
> developers : it can help answer questions like :
> - which bug should I fix first ?
> - which merge/sync should I work on first ?
> - etc
> 
> However, it seems that we get very few popcon results, mostly from
> old-timers (was popcon once enabled by default during the warty release
> cycle ?). Also, the pages have not been updated in a very long time (see
> Bugzilla bug 12761).
> 
> Is there something planned to get all this back in shape, or should we
> use Debian's popcon results instead ?

In general, popcon doesn't answer these questions as effectively for us as
it does for Debian, due to the fact that most users use the preselected
desktop environment.  These packages dominate the results, and the variance
in the remaining packages doesn't seem very informative.

The problem of determining which packages are important to users is, I
think, more complex for us than is allowed for by popcon's approach.  In
general, genuine application use is more interesting than package
installation and file access, and this is more difficult to measure.
Surveys, while they have their own problem, would seem to give us more
useful results.

For example, a Fridge poll about Epiphany vs. Firefox would give some idea
of what the user community prefers today.

-- 
 - mdz