Bug#238687: popularity-contest: popularity contest should provide subarch info.
On Sat, Jan 13, 2024 at 12:51:47PM -0800, Matt Taggart wrote: > It's been quite a while since this bug was discussed, but I have another use > case where it might be interesting... > > There has been some recent discussion about "Architecture Variants" and in > particular amd64 variants. Fedora and Ubuntu are both working on experiments > with the goal of being able to optimize for newer versions of the amd64 > architecture (and potentially dropping older variants at some point as > well). Here is a page that gathers info on this idea for Debian > > https://wiki.debian.org/ArchitectureVariants > > Knowing information about which variants our installed base is using would > help make these decisions easier. The past i386 decisions were a little > easier because there were particular packages we could look at to get those > numbers. Hello Matt, thanks for reviving this bug. Note that unfortunately, none of the requirement I set up in the my previous answer to this bug have been addressed. In particular, there is no official definition of subarchitecture and tool that report it that popcon could use. However, I doubt the practicality of reporting subarchitectures: 1/ users might not be running the latest Debian release, and there is no way to know if they plan to upgrade. 2/ the number of users running some subarchitectures is likely to be very small, which breaks anonymity. Cheers, Bill
Bug#238687: popularity-contest: popularity contest should provide subarch info.
It's been quite a while since this bug was discussed, but I have another use case where it might be interesting... There has been some recent discussion about "Architecture Variants" and in particular amd64 variants. Fedora and Ubuntu are both working on experiments with the goal of being able to optimize for newer versions of the amd64 architecture (and potentially dropping older variants at some point as well). Here is a page that gathers info on this idea for Debian https://wiki.debian.org/ArchitectureVariants Knowing information about which variants our installed base is using would help make these decisions easier. The past i386 decisions were a little easier because there were particular packages we could look at to get those numbers. Side note In addition to this bug, it seems there are some other cases where people would like to press popcon into service to gather other things: kernel modules https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=202675 report arch only https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=545000 report foreign architectures https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931764 Package versions https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=97045 aptitude auto flag https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=313194 package config file data https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=816281 We can understand why it is tempting to want to do so. But there are also privacy and scope implications. So maybe the first step is a clear policy of what is appropriate for popcon to do, and the things that aren't should be WONTFIX. Thanks, -- Matt Taggart m...@lackof.org
