On Sun, 18 Jan 2009, Steve Langasek wrote:
Right - the statistics themselves are interesting, but the assumption that more list posting is better is an unhealthy one.
Could you please quote where I said this. Perhaps I described some things to simple - but I hope I did not this kind of oversimplification explicitely.
For instance, I was gratified to see the statistics for debian-legal, because they support my position that the discussion there is being DoSed by non-DDs who are trying to use it as a forum to persuade Debian that their interpretation of the DFSG is the correct one.
Perhaps I should be more restraining if it comes to lists I do not know. But hey, I'm fine that the graph supports another interpretation and so it is not bad to have the graph, right?
And in the comments on debian-qa, Andreas, you conclude that QA is important and it would be good to see a wider base - but the debian-qa list is only a very small segment of the overall QA activity in Debian, most of which doesn't need centralized coordination...
At least debian-qa is "maintainer" of an increasing amount of packages and I always wonder who is a reliable coworker (is available and avtive over a long time period). This conclusion can not be drawn out of the currently avaibale list statistics on lists.debian.org.
BTW, as near as I can tell the reports only show the figures for the top-ten all-time posters on each list. So there are probably a number of lists where the top poster within a single year isn't represented at all - what you're really capturing here is "when have the most active contributors to each mailing list been the most active", which isn't a very good proxy at all for "what is the list activity over time".
On small volume lists my measure works perfectly to sort out the people who showed up for a short time and than left the project, it work to see whether people are constantly joining etc. If you are really active in one year you are most probably amongst the top ten and people will see whether you are active in only one year when you came and perhaps they know reason why somebody left. This is interesting information for several projects. The list activity over time is just graphed at http://lists.debian.org/stats/<listname>.png I did not wanted to reinvent the wheel. I wanted to have answers to questions which this graph can not answer. I explained it in my talk at Debconf and people agreed and asked me for more graphs. That's why I did them and well, I don't make stats about the pro's and con's but more and more pros hit my mailbox and only a view cons. That's no proof that I did everything right and I'm meanwhile convinced that I took some missinterpretations. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org