Disclaimer: I tried to jump back into the fray last night. Ended up with two epic long chapters now sitting in draft. It was just too much..
Up this morning and now seeing all kinds of "that topic" related activity again today. Mixed in among those threads was something that comes out about this time each week from the PHP folks (php...@lists.php.net). It's their mental "toggle" to remind people to check in and help, but that's not my primary point here. Today's output for them is referencing *24309* cumulative user notes potentially needing some kind of TLC.... _this week_. Twenty-four THOUSAND plus.. THAT is just document notes, and that is ONE project, albeit one of the larger ones around. And that's not any other activity that developers are doing on that project in the same way Debian developers work on so many different aspects here.. An immediate Debian example that *delightfully* stuns me every time it happens is regarding "apt-get update". I've had "apt-get update" get disconnected for whatever reason so have had to run it right away again to complete it. Invariably there are even more new updates within the sometimes only five, ten minutes lapse time in between update attempts.. Seeing those in the context of being a seeming final process checkmark, I've been a-suming that the visually apparent minute by minute constant change represents developers hard at work all OVER the place ALL the time.. That all said, does Debian generate any kind of statistical information related to developer activity? Yes, I know you can't quantify the cognitive work involved.. I'm just thinking about the aspects of it that can be quantified because they're being registered in a server somewhere for posterity.. My thought process is that it might help put some perspective somehow, I don't know quite how, but just SOME kind of perspective on what developers face over time... Some of that thought process includes things like... I've noticed people's command outputs that share an eye catching 30 packages that still need upgraded in their systems. It would be easy for someone with that low count to say, "What?! Only 30?! What are developers doing with the REST of their time?!" Meanwhile k/t the hodgepodge I've got going here, I've been fortunate to see numbers in the thousands, not to mention regular references to that there are TENS OF THOUSANDS of possibilities for things out there... IN FACT... just ran "apt-cache search the" and received back a 2.4MB sized file containing 37,601 lines. I just quickly scanned the output. Everything I saw showed one single line per package name. I've never had a problem with apt-cache duplicating output so I'm trusting it didn't this time, either. Does that 37,601 sound possible as the number of available packages containing the word "the" that users can download today? Yes, no, maybe so? Quantitatively multiply out those tens of thousands of packages times how many seconds, how many minutes per each that general maintenance takes, let alone any other developer driven [function] that might be performed on them... Oh, wait.... NOT done yet... Each package does NOT contain only one single solitary standalone file, either.. Each package's files needs its due head nod within that quantifying process, too.. 37,601 lines, each appearing to represent a unique software package that theoretically should receive regular developer tending. *hm* :) Cindy -- Cindy-Sue Causey Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA * Fencesitter Extraordinaire * -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/cao1p-kag6p0-+kxnvizdqfy44hxftqmc-w5jpfhdhh634bj...@mail.gmail.com