[Popcon-developers] To the maintainers of the Debian Package Popularity Contest

[xu.zhang at telecom-bretagne.eu]

Hi,

I'm a phd student in the department of Computer Science at  
Telecom-Bretagne, France. I'm writing to ask for your help which will  
be greatly valuable for my research work.

The subject of my thesis is "a distributed package management  
network". Our project aims at constructing a decentralized  
infrastructure that facilitates the deployment and distribution of  
free software packages in the future Internet (just like what apt does  
today but in a fully-decentralized manner and with more concern on  
user-generated software).

In order to study the main properties of package distribution as well  
as to launch simulations, we are currently trying to collect trace  
data from individuals (ex: students in our school) who wish to provide  
information of their own systems (installed packages, version of each  
package, update history etc). However, it is very difficult for us to  
obtain anonymous data from a large scale, non-administered network.  
That's why the Debian Popularity Contest has greatly attracted our  
interest. So our request here is, could you please allow us to access  
your database which contains the raw data collected weekly? We promise  
that this data will only be used for research purpose. It will be very  
helpful for us to have this information. Pleas let us know if you have  
any question concerning our project. Thank you in advance.

ZHANG Xu

------------------------
Tel: +33 0229001561
Department of Computer Science,
Telecom Bretagne, Technopôle,
Iroise, 83818 29238,
Brest Cedex 3