[Popcon-developers] Re: Time to announce popcon on -announce?

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Bill Allombert]
> 2 things:
> 
> 1) I plan to invalidate submission after 20 days instead of 10 days.

Sounds good.  That might get rid of the strange wave pattern on the
graphs.

> 2) I would expect the release of a new debian-installer beta to get
> an increase of popcon submission.

So would I.  It should happen in the next few days.

> You can't send it to d-announce, only joey@d.o can do that, iiuc.
> If you send it d-d-announce, joey will link it to the Debian Weekly
> News which is sent to debian-news.

Well, I am sure I can poke the right people to get it sent on
d-announce, but I am not sure if it is worth it.  I guess d-d-announce
will do for now, even if it will fail to reach a lot of the debian
users.  The last announcement was to d-devel, so I guess d-d-announce
is the correct next choice. :)

Here is a draft announcement:

  Subject: Make Debian CDs even better

  These days, the next stable release of debian is being packaged.  It
  will as usual also be released on CDs, and the current CD count is
  13 binary CDs filled with approximately 13500 packages.  And to
  distribute these packages on the 13 CDs, we need to come up with
  some sorting order.  At the moment, some of the packages on the
  first and second CD is selected based on various criteria, while the
  rest are sorted based on their usage as reported by
  popularity-contest.

  The Debian popularity-contest is a concept created by Avery Pennarun
  a few years ago.  It set up a program on the hosts installing the
  popularity-contest package, to email the list of packages installed
  and in use to a central collection point.  It also collect the host
  architecture and we plan to collect kernel version and modules used
  as well.  The summaries are presented on
  <URL:http://popcon.debian.org/> and used to sort the packages on the
  Debian CDs.

  The information can be used in other areas as well.  It can detect
  which packages in the debian archive which aren't installed on any
  hosts.  Such packages should probably be checked out and possibly be
  removed from the archive.  It has already been used to check which
  non-free packages are actually in use, while discussing the future
  for non-free.

  So this is an request to all of you out there, to install the
  popularity-contest package, say yes to participate (and verify
  'PARTICIPATE=yes' in /etc/popularity-contest.conf), and give us more
  info on which packages are in use in Debian.

Any comments, typos, etc?