Getting popcon back in shape

[Rocco Stanzione]

Thus spake Evandro Fernandes Giovanini:
> Em Sex, 2006-01-06 às 10:16 -0800, Matt Zimmerman escreveu:
> > For example, a Fridge poll about Epiphany vs. Firefox would give some idea
> > of what the user community prefers today.
> > 
> 
> IMHO it's not about what the Fridge visitors prefer today, but what is
> the best default for the users Ubuntu targets. There's a huge difference
> there.
> 
> There's a lot of valuable feedback from the community that Ubuntu should
> definitely listen to on this matter, but online polls are not
> replacements for this kind of decision.

I find support forums to be a great indicator of which packages want the most attention.  In irc, for example, the default permissions win32 filesystems are mounted with generate an incredible amount of traffic as users try to access their windows files.  It might not be straightforward, or even feasible, to generate usable data from something like that, or it might be worth looking into, perhaps with irc bots, mailing list spiders etc.

Rocco