Improving coverage of popularity contest data?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 04:13:58PM -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
> I like the data at
> http://popcon.ubuntu.com/
> but since it's opt-in, it's only useful for relative comparisons,
> and the data might be skewed towards power users.
> 
> Are there ways we could increase the coverage of the data
> such that we get many more users, especially those who would
> not normally bother to install or configure funny packages like popcon?
> 
> Two ideas:
> 
> 1) somehow encourage normal users to turn on popcon, e.g.
> by a checkbox during installation of the distribution

We don't want to complicate the installation process with unnecessary
questions, or otherwise nag the user.  popularity-contest is already
installed by default, however, so we only need to address the question of
enabling it (it's inactive by default).

It would be worthwhile to provide an easier way for the user to opt-in; I
believe it currently requires reconfiguring the package using
dpkg-reconfigure or editing a config file.  It ought to be a checkbox in
Software Properties.  I've drafted a spec here:

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/simple-popcon-participation

> 2) gather similar statistics from the access logs of the ubuntu repository

This we will likely do anyway.

-- 
 - mdz