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#26 2010-09-25 15:37:39

Pierre
Developer
From: Bonn
Registered: 2004-07-05
Posts: 1,964
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

No, the results are only available for premium users. Otherwise I would have put a link into the first posting, our frontpage or even the pkgstats output.

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#27 2010-09-25 16:30:29

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Pierre wrote:

No, the results are only available for premium users. Otherwise I would have put a link into the first posting, our frontpage or even the pkgstats output.

too bad;-)

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#28 2010-09-25 17:51:17

marfig
Member
From: Portugal
Registered: 2010-07-30
Posts: 189
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

I'm not installing. Sorry folks sad

Unless maybe...

I never quite clearly understood this notion of job prioritization based on incomplete and inconsistent data (as is the case with packages installed on anyone's machine). This is not new to Arch; I've seen it before. But for anyone not using your mainstream package and relying instead on a less common package, this can actually become a problem. At the very least I would hope that this collected data has only so much influence on the developer/maintainer decisions when building their TODO list. As an example, while everyone uses gcc, I bet the fewer that use the sqlite library would rather see the latter given priority over the former.

So, I'm really not sure what is trying to be achieved here. I consider package popularity rather useless data. I'd rather see developers/maintainers using their intuition and their own experience with these packages when doing their TODO list.

Maybe if I could be convinced I'm wrong...


I probably made this post longer than it should only because I lack the time to make it shorter.
- Paraphrased from Blaise Pascal

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#29 2010-09-25 21:34:43

adamlau
Member
Registered: 2009-01-30
Posts: 418

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Stats submitted, any way we can examine our own individual submissions as opposed to the aggregate total?


Arch Linux + sway
Debian Testing + GNOME/sway
NetBSD 64-bit + Xfce

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#30 2010-09-25 22:02:34

hokasch
Member
Registered: 2007-09-23
Posts: 1,461

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Pierre wrote:

Data that are sent by pkgstats:
* list of installed packages without version numbers
* the architecture
* the mirror used (without any username/password scheme)
* the version of pkgstats in use

*pacman -Qq
*uname -m
*cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
* pacman -Qi pkgstat
tongue
apart from that,

Pierre wrote:

1) I don't want track individual users for privacy reasons.

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#31 2010-09-25 22:50:49

adamlau
Member
Registered: 2009-01-30
Posts: 418

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Heh...Thanks, hokasch smile . I was too lazy to read past the initial two posts sad


Arch Linux + sway
Debian Testing + GNOME/sway
NetBSD 64-bit + Xfce

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#32 2010-09-25 23:25:48

Allan
Pacman
From: Brisbane, AU
Registered: 2007-06-09
Posts: 11,470
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

marfig wrote:

I never quite clearly understood this notion of job prioritization based on incomplete and inconsistent data

It is better than basing it on no information....

At the very least I would hope that this collected data has only so much influence on the developer/maintainer decisions when building their TODO list. As an example, while everyone uses gcc, I bet the fewer that use the sqlite library would rather see the latter given priority over the former.

That is an interesting viewpoint...  I think it is highly based on the fact that the packages everyone uses (such as gcc) are already in [core] so are already treated at a higher priority by the developers.  It is packages such as those that everyone relies on, but they are taken fore-granted because they rarely break. What is the point of fixing a bug in sqlite if you can not recompile your projects to take advantage of it?

Anyway... last time this informed us that a whole bunch of [extra] getting absolutely no use.  A lot of these packages were popular a few years back and had now been superseded (although some were just never popular in the first place...).  Using that information, we were able to clean-up the [extra] repo and prioritise our effort towards more popular packages.  There is no point spending developer time maintaining or fixing bugs in packages that very few people use - that is what the AUR is for.

At the moment, we have ~400 packages in [extra] that appear not to be installed on any computer.  Given the number of submissions, we can be fairly certain they are on less than 1% of Arch computers and should probably be dropped from [extra].  While the numbers are clearly not perfect (due to issues pointed out above), they reflect the installs of people who have contributed towards the information.  As always in Arch, if you do not contribute, we do not care about you.

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#33 2010-09-26 00:34:31

jdarnold
Member
From: Medford MA USA
Registered: 2009-12-15
Posts: 485
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

But how do you get the IP? My ip is a 192.168 IP address. And I guess you are just getting weekly ideas of the packages out there, so I doubt there's anything about not counting something if it hasn't changed.

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#34 2010-09-26 01:15:08

RetroX
Member
Registered: 2009-10-17
Posts: 106

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

This is actually pretty neat.  It would be nice if it tracked AUR/unknown repo packages as well, though.

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#35 2010-09-26 01:16:00

kazuo
Member
From: São Paulo/Brazil
Registered: 2008-03-18
Posts: 413
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Allan wrote:

Anyway... last time this informed us that a whole bunch of [extra] getting absolutely no use. [...] Using that information, we were able to clean-up the [extra] repo and prioritise our effort towards more popular packages.

Agreed, better to have a quality over 9000 packages used by no one. Usually we has a lot of program for doing exactly the same thing and is hard to decide what is the "best" one, the popular one is a good start (at least in Arch I seen to share the taste of the community, the top packages used in the pools are the one I like most.). So having only the most used in the official repos help me to decide what to use in general (sometimes a lost program can be very good).

Allan wrote:

As always in Arch, if you do not contribute, we do not care about you.

One more memorable quote for my quote file!

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#36 2010-09-26 01:37:44

adamlau
Member
Registered: 2009-01-30
Posts: 418

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Funny quote indeed smile . Just submitted stats for three ThinkPads wink .


Arch Linux + sway
Debian Testing + GNOME/sway
NetBSD 64-bit + Xfce

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#37 2010-09-26 02:32:22

Snowman
Developer/Forum Fellow
From: Montreal, Canada
Registered: 2004-08-20
Posts: 5,212

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

RetroX wrote:

It would be nice if it tracked AUR/unknown repo packages as well, though.

It does.

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#38 2010-09-26 03:22:56

marfig
Member
From: Portugal
Registered: 2010-07-30
Posts: 189
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Allan wrote:

Anyway... last time this informed us that a whole bunch of [extra] getting absolutely no use.  A lot of these packages were popular a few years back and had now been superseded (although some were just never popular in the first place...).  Using that information, we were able to clean-up the [extra] repo and prioritise our effort towards more popular packages.  There is no point spending developer time maintaining or fixing bugs in packages that very few people use - that is what the AUR is for.

That's the kind of thing I was hoping for. A convincing argument. Thanks.
Being able to contribute to clean and relevant official repos is definitely something I can do to help you guys.

Allan wrote:

As always in Arch, if you do not contribute, we do not care about you.

But with an hefty price tag at the end, doesn't it? While I appreciate the ulterior motive (make no mistake, you convinced me joining with the above argument) what this essentially means is that participating in this popularity contest you guys put up, has the potential to throw back to Community -- and possibly even AUR -- packages that may be on some user high usability list. Ironically, further shifting the pressure to a repo already low on human resources. "Let someone else handle it", with all the costs that may mean to the end user...

I'm sorry, but I'm not big on quotes when they don't actually reflect the reality. I'd rather have you say on this case "if you don't contribute, you can't help us". Fixed.

EDIT: BTW, it didn't occur anyone putting up a package voting mechanism? Just wondering, because installed packages is just a bad preamble of what actually is going on on every user machine. And the wrong way to describe how exactly users value each package on their machine.

Last edited by marfig (2010-09-26 03:26:40)


I probably made this post longer than it should only because I lack the time to make it shorter.
- Paraphrased from Blaise Pascal

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#39 2010-09-26 03:24:48

mcmillan
Member
Registered: 2006-04-06
Posts: 737

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

adamlau wrote:

Stats submitted, any way we can examine our own individual submissions as opposed to the aggregate total?

While hokasch already posted a way to get this, there's also pkgstats -s which will output all the info it's supposed to send

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#40 2010-09-26 09:20:24

ngoonee
Forum Fellow
From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,358

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

marfig wrote:

EDIT: BTW, it didn't occur anyone putting up a package voting mechanism? Just wondering, because installed packages is just a bad preamble of what actually is going on on every user machine. And the wrong way to describe how exactly users value each package on their machine.

Everybody values the packages that they use. Its not an apples-to-oranges comparison when comparing how much anyone 'likes' or 'wants' a particular package. The only 'fair' comparison is the amount of actual usage.

If package foo only has 20 users, it should be in the AUR (unless one of those users is a dev) or community. Even if all 20 users consider it absolutely crucial to their system (if that's the case, they can download the PKGBUILD and makepkg it).

What this does is move the responsibility for package maintainance to those who use the packages, rather than having devs fix bugs on packages with a few dozen users. In a community-driven distro like this, the community needs to take care of all 'specialty' packages.


Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

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#41 2010-09-26 14:15:36

serprex
Member
Registered: 2010-08-04
Posts: 10
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

It'd be best if this only had optional dependencies (Alright, the pacman dependency is a bit hard to factor out), as as of installing this I now have cron installed

Last edited by serprex (2010-09-26 14:15:53)

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#42 2010-09-26 16:04:03

Pierre
Developer
From: Bonn
Registered: 2004-07-05
Posts: 1,964
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Cron is needed to get data regularly. Aside from some special cases, all system should have cron anyway.

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#43 2010-09-27 00:21:45

ngoonee
Forum Fellow
From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,358

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Out of curiosity, serprex, why don't you have cron installed?


Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

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#44 2010-09-27 07:52:05

schivmeister
Developer/TU
From: Singapore
Registered: 2007-05-17
Posts: 971
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

jdarnold wrote:

But how do you get the IP? My ip is a 192.168 IP address.

That is your local (private) address, and no-one cares about it. Your router or whatever has the Internet (public) IP.

Snowman wrote:
RetroX wrote:

It would be nice if it tracked AUR/unknown repo packages as well, though.

It does.

Just look at the "unknown" section. Those include AUR and everything else including third-party repos.


I need real, proper pen and paper for this.

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#45 2010-09-27 09:48:06

birdspider
Member
From: Vienna
Registered: 2007-12-29
Posts: 33
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

it would be nice to have a link to the packages on the results page
(i.e. "everyone has this package" .. link .. "hmm whats that")

edit: or an ajax tooltip with the pkg description

Last edited by birdspider (2010-09-27 09:50:43)

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#46 2010-09-27 11:03:54

stryder
Member
Registered: 2009-02-28
Posts: 500

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Just installed. BTW the installation instruction in the news item was "pacman -Sy pkgstats". I thought there was a long discussion on this matter and the conclusion was that the proper way was "pacman -S pkgstats".

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#47 2010-09-27 12:06:49

DaNiMoTh
Member
Registered: 2006-06-10
Posts: 260

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Just a question: Could be the server side part be installed on others server, without entire archlinux.de environment? We would use this on archppc.

Thanks

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#48 2010-09-27 13:32:27

Pierre
Developer
From: Bonn
Registered: 2004-07-05
Posts: 1,964
Website

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

See my mail to arch-dev-public. My plan is to decouple it so its a stand-alone script.

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#49 2010-09-27 13:43:49

anonymous_user
Member
Registered: 2009-08-28
Posts: 3,059

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

Allan wrote:

Anyway... last time this informed us that a whole bunch of [extra] getting absolutely no use.  A lot of these packages were popular a few years back and had now been superseded (although some were just never popular in the first place...).  Using that information, we were able to clean-up the [extra] repo and prioritise our effort towards more popular packages.  There is no point spending developer time maintaining or fixing bugs in packages that very few people use - that is what the AUR is for.

At the moment, we have ~400 packages in [extra] that appear not to be installed on any computer.  Given the number of submissions, we can be fairly certain they are on less than 1% of Arch computers and should probably be dropped from [extra].  While the numbers are clearly not perfect (due to issues pointed out above), they reflect the installs of people who have contributed towards the information.

I'm definitely interested in seeing what results this time.

BTW since installations are a better signal than votes, I wonder if any packages get moved from AUR to community based on their usage.

Last edited by anonymous_user (2010-09-27 13:45:36)

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#50 2010-09-27 13:48:21

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: pkgstats round two: take your vote and help improving Arch

There's e.g.

[archstuff]
# AUR's most voted packages
Server = http://archstuff.vs169092.vserver.de/$arch

as a proof that some people care about some other people's votes :-)

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