Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 05:46:49PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
I suppose I shouldn't really be discussing this too much since it's a
question for the DPL candidates rather than a general discussion topic,
I believe this kind of interaction is perfectly fine, as it is showing
various hidden facets of previously raised questions, giving to
candidates the possibility to voice their opinions on them.
I want Debian to continue to be an excellent server operating system that
I can use for Stanford University's internal IT infrastructure. If it
changed in a way that made it a bad server operating system but made it
much more popular in the broad sense, that to me would be a bug, not a
feature.
Obviously insofar as we can, we all want Debian to be all things to all
people, and I think we all owe each other an obligation to try to find
good solutions for everything that people want to use Debian for, among
those people who are working on it.
Absolutely. As a minor point on this: exactly _because_ Debian can't be
all things to all people out of the box, we are quite fond of
configurability in what we offer. The resulting flexibility is what, I
believe, makes Debian the server operating system you can use at
Stanford, among other uses. I don't think that changing a specific
default can make Debian no longer suitable for your, or any other, use,
as long as we are as flexible as we are now.
But, even acknowledging good questions about how to attract new
contributors, I don't think pure popularity should be a driving goal
for the project, and certainly shouldn't override other goals such as
sound technical judgement.
AJ's question, and particularly his other longer response to the question
about disappearing DPLs, really highlight what I think are some
disagreements between he and I about how we see Debian. I fundamentally
do not believe in the grow or die model or think that projects need to
constantly move on to the next shiny thing.
I agree that our technical values are more important than the grow or
die model, but that kind of reasoning should not led us thinking that
growing is not important at all. While growing in number of users is not
a goal per se, the number of users has a high correlation with the
number of *contributors* (in fact, every user that even only submit a
bug report is already a useful contributor). That kind of flow from user
to developer is, shamelessly re-using your nice words, part of the
grand open source tradition too.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:52:19AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
So at the start of the week, I asked:
Eh, kudos for this experiment, even if people on IRC commented that
there might have been a second reason for your question :-P, I didn't
see this coming. I feel like replying to a couple of your comments,
though.
There's a bunch of people who use Ubuntu as their main systems these
days who've said things like yeah, I know, I'll install Debian on it
some time, but this was just easy for now. For me, I tend to consider
them to already be using Debian systems -- I mean, they're already
using all the Debian-specific programs I've written or worked on for
Debian, so what difference does it /really/ make if it's all coloured
brown or purple instead of swirly and red? I don't see a difference,
so I count them as Debian users personally. YMMV (if it does, I'd be
interested to hear what important differences you see)
It is the same or it is different according to which angle of the
user-distro relationship you consider.
In the above, you seem to consider only the angle of the pride of
having someone benefiting of our work, which is a well-known motive to
sponsor volunteer work in FLOSS. I'm truly happy to know that many of my
changelog lines (and the work they entail) are part of the Ubuntu
installation of millions of user. According to this angle, Ubuntu users
are Debian users.
However, a user in FLOSS is generally someone that contribute back, in
various ways: from bug reporting, to patch contribution, and possibly
even co-maintenance. According to this angle, Ubuntu users are not
Debian users, in the sense that they contribute their feedback and
patches not directly to us, but to a different intermediate entity (and
yes, Ubuntu is not special in this analysis, any or our derivative
distros is in the same ballpark).
Now, in a perfectly working FLOSS ecosystem, this happens at all levels
(e.g. are Debian/GNOME users direct GNOME users?) and it makes no
difference if you are a direct or indirect user of something, because
contributions flow seamlessly in all directions: a patch contributed via
Ubuntu lands in Debian, a patch contributed to Debian lands upstream,
etc.
As we know, this is not always the case: contributions can get stuck at
some point of the contribution pipeline. That is why the distinction
among direct and indirect users---and its n-level
generalization---matters and, ultimately, this is why there is some sort
of competition among the amount of users of tightly related projects.
As I've written in my platform (search for derivatives) we should do
as much as we can to not be an element of the contribution pipeline
where contributions get stuck. Nevertheless, as long as such pipeline do
not work perfectly---and that does not depend only on us, but also on
the behavior of our downstreams---it is just natural to make some kind
of distinctions about our direct and indirect users.
[ minor quote re-ordering ]
And presumably being able to say we've got $BIGNUM of users is
useful for promotion, and we've got $PRECISE users might be useful
for capacity planning to some extent. I think those probably should be
things prospective DPLs should think about, at least briefly.
I concur with this ...
The other aspect is, how can you say we're listening to our users?
if we don't even have any idea how many of them there are?
... but not with this. To say that you're listening to our users you
need to show that you react to their contributions (assuming naively
that the main kind of talk we receive from users are contributions,
from bug reporting up), no matter how many they are. It might be a cheap
argument from logics, but the goal is that FORALL contribution you
receive, you react to them: to prove that you really don't need to know
how many users you have.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:52:19AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:49:47PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: Then we can look at the official mirrors logs (for distinct IPs regularly downloading package indexes in a given time window), and at the same index downloads for security.d.o (which is enabled by default and most likely not accessed via mirrors). I actually thought I'd done that at some point just for kicks, but I don't seem to be able to find what the results might have been. (Note You did do this - it was during a meeting at DebConf7 and you were reporting everything verbally as you went along so I rather suspect that the results never got written down. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100326123702.gg27...@sirena.org.uk
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:52:19AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: I note Steve points out: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 03:06:37PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/123481/index.html which cites estimates of 6-8 million Ubuntu users, for a factor of between 4 and 5.3 compared to Ubuntu's popcon reports. If you assumed a similar factor for Debian's popcon reports, that would give an estimate of between 350,000 and 500,000 users. I tend to think Ubuntu users are more likely to run popcon than Debian users, and thus that those numbers are low, but I don't have any data to back that up or to estimate how low. And obviously I don't have any idea where the 6-8M estimates were pulled from, or how realistic they are. FWIW, a rough estimate of iceweasel 3.5.8 users (which means testing, unstable and backports), based on access logs for the page that gets displayed after version upgrades, is somewhere around 100,000 users, as of today. While popcon can't tell us how many of the popcon users are using iceweasel 3.5.8 vs. 3.0.x, we can have an upper bound of that from the number of xulrunner-1.9.1 installations. Surely, galeon, conkeror, kazehakase,etc. also depend on xulrunner-1.9.1, but they don't account for so many popcon users (it's also impossible to tell apart which ones are using xulrunner-1.9 and which ones are using xulrunner-1.9.1). So there would be less than 13062 popcon users with iceweasel 3.5.x installed, but not much less. Also, the number of xulrunner-1.9.1 users accounted by popcon went dramatically up recently, in two waves, the first one from the migration to testing and the second one from the update of backports. I see the same waves on the access logs used to estimate the actual number of iceweasel users above. The factor for testing, unstable and backport desktop users would thus be somewhere around 7.7. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100326134221.ga21...@glandium.org
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:52:19AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 05:19:20PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: Bearing in mind: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users? [..] On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:49:47PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: Then we can look at the official mirrors logs (for distinct IPs regularly downloading package indexes in a given time window), and at the same index downloads for security.d.o (which is enabled by default and most likely not accessed via mirrors). I actually thought I'd done that at some point just for kicks, but I don't seem to be able to find what the results might have been. (Note security.d.o resolves to different IPs in different countries these days; It gives 1.5 million unique IPs (with only 45k IPv6) over all mirrors behind security.d.o (as of February 2010, only from HTTP logs, some more hits with FTP). and both those measures are affected by undercounting due to proxies and overcounting due to dynamic IPs among other things) Integrate a unique ID in the apt user-agent string ? :p -- Simon Paillard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100327013314.ga29...@dedibox.ebzao.info
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
So at the start of the week, I asked: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 05:19:20PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: Bearing in mind: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users? (I haven't seen a reply from Charles Plessy, but it's been a few days, so moving on seems fair...) For me, the trick part of the question is whether or not the machines reporting to popcon.ubuntu.com should be counted as Debian users, both Stefano and Marga picked up on that, without actually stating an opinion either way: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:49:47PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: I've already reported in a previous thread on -vote [1] about the study by Gaudenz Steinlin showing that our user base has been decreasing steadily since the first release of Ubuntu (whose users you might want to consider as Debian users or not). [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2010/03/msg00143.html On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 03:08:29PM -0300, Margarita Manterola wrote: Do Debian users include Debian derivatives users? :) There's a bunch of people who use Ubuntu as their main systems these days who've said things like yeah, I know, I'll install Debian on it some time, but this was just easy for now. For me, I tend to consider them to already be using Debian systems -- I mean, they're already using all the Debian-specific programs I've written or worked on for Debian, so what difference does it /really/ make if it's all coloured brown or purple instead of swirly and red? I don't see a difference, so I count them as Debian users personally. YMMV (if it does, I'd be interested to hear what important differences you see) If Ubuntu systems count as Debian systems, who, in that case, counts as Debian users as far as the social contract's concerned? The actual people who install it, even if they've never heard of Debian? Maybe the Ubuntu devs who are pulling source from Debian? Debian developers nominally promise to put our users first in our priorities, right up there with free software itself. Based on the popcon numbers it's possible almost 95% of Debian's userbase get at Debian through Ubuntu. Using Google trends or distrowatch or others would probably give you different percentages, but it still seems pretty significant, and maybe warrants more attention. Stefano and Marga both wondered explicitly what the point is: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:49:47PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: I'm not going to give an actual estimate because I lack a significant amount of needed data and, frankly speaking, I don't see why the exercise of actually arriving at a number might be interesting as campaigning material (if I'm missing something fundamental about why it is so, please explain). On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 03:08:29PM -0300, Margarita Manterola wrote: I think this question is indeed very tricky, and I don't see the point of it being posted as a question during the campaign period. How can my estimation change your vote? I haven't picked who I'm voting for yet, so it can't actually change my vote... That aside, I think it lets the candidates demonstrate how they approach a problem, which can be interesting. * do they actually answer the question or avoid it? - Wouter gave a guess based on a multiplier for the popcon data - Stefano declined to give an answer, but suggested augmenting the popcon data with download counts from mirrors and security.d.o, along with a reference to some related research - Marga declined to give an answer beyond a very conservative many more than [the] 90k [from popcon] - Charles hasn't answered yet * how do they react to the Ubuntu reference? - Wouter mostly ignored it, and said I don't think it holds any relevance to what we do in relation to whether popcon should be opt-in or opt-out - Stefano noted our user base has been decreasing steadily since the first release of Ubuntu and was concerned about it - Marga didn't mention it, except to ask if users of derivatives count as users of Debian * when asked a pretty straightforward question, do they have any new/deep insights? do they do any interesting analysis to come to a more useful conclusion than others are able to? - For me, those are pretty much killer features in a candidate for just about anything. YMMV :) * do they build on other people's estimates, or change their own based on new ideas by other people? - It's free software, collaboration is important. It's an election, collaboration is Just Not Done. The other aspect is, how can you say we're listening to our users? if we don't even have any idea how many of them there are? And
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
Dear Anthony, sorry for not keeping up with the answers, this campaign is very intensive ! It is interesting that your question was a kind of mini-experiment. As a molecular biologist, I like experiments a lot. Below is the draft that I never sent because I did not find time to add some flesh to it. Please take it as somehing that I thought is not ready to be sent, but that reveals bits about my state of mind before you announce the result of youre experiment. Have a nice day, -- Charles Le Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 05:19:20PM +1000, Anthony Towns a écrit : What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users? Le Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 02:27:23PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz a écrit : That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the usage of pocon, and should Debian do so, too? Hi Anthony, Bernd, everybody, I do not know if Ubuntu has Popcon switched on by default. But on the upstream mailing lists where I am subscribed, I think that I see more Ubuntu users than Debian users. Since it is lists about scientific software, this worries me. What is Ubuntu giving them that Debian does not have? We do not play 3D games at work, and use LAN cables more often than wireless. Not to mention that Debian also provides non-free drivers for the users who need them.. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100326010250.gb19...@kunpuu.plessy.org
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
* Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) [100323 01:47]: AJ's question, and particularly his other longer response to the question about disappearing DPLs, really highlight what I think are some disagreements between he and I about how we see Debian. I fundamentally do not believe in the grow or die model or think that projects need to constantly move on to the next shiny thing. I need to disagree a bit: I believe in grow or die, but grow doesn't need to be in quantity. So, if we get better and better (and our tools easier to work with, etc) we also grow but in quality. (And if I compare squeeze with sarge I can see lots of differences where looking back I always think oh, this obviously was quite painful.) (Of course, this supports everything else you said.) Andi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100324083715.go19...@mails.so.argh.org
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
* Stefano Zacchiroli (z...@debian.org) [100322 21:50]: All in all, this is probably a topic where a quick and easy devotee-based poll might show where the DD body stands in the trade-off between the advantages and disadvantages of enabling popcon submissions by default, and finally get this discussion past us. JFTR, I don't think that a quick and easy poll is always a sufficient way to resolve issues. I think one of the strength of Debian is that we try to analyze the situation before we do a decision. Which has the advantage that we could usually uphold our decisions because they are well thought. (And the disadvantage that some people don't understand that speaking and thinking things over needs time. Somehow thinking things over in a good way doesn't match the way the media tell us how it shold be.) Andi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100324084717.gp19...@mails.so.argh.org
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 09:47:17AM +0100, Andreas Barth wrote:
JFTR, I don't think that a quick and easy poll is always a
sufficient way to resolve issues. I think one of the strength of
Debian is that we try to analyze the situation before we do a
decision.
I absolutely agree. On one hand, that is why I've mentioned a poll and
not a GR. More importantly, there are some technical decisions that
ultimately arrive at an aut-aut choice, e.g. the choice of a default
value which is changeable by the user anyhow. I believe the case
discussed in the post you followed-up to is one of them. As other
choices of default values, what we've discussed reminds me very much of
when we switched from nvi to vim-tiny in the base system [1] (one of
the few cases in which we did use a poll, FWIW).
The whole point of a poll is to give a non-binding representation of
opinions in some aut-aut choices; such a representation can ultimately
be even ignored, but at least we will make it visible.
Hope this clarifies,
Cheers.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00796.html
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 4:19 AM, Anthony Towns a...@erisian.com.au wrote: What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users? Do Debian users include Debian derivatives users? :) I think this question is indeed very tricky, and I don't see the point of it being posted as a question during the campaign period. How can my estimation change your vote? I certainly do believe that we have many more thank 90k users, and the only reason that we don't count so many of them in popcon is that our direct users get to choose whether they want to participate in popcon or not, and many times they don't. I'll refrain from estimating a number. I'll just say that I plan to work on making Debian more attractive to users, not by changing what we do, but by trying to change how Debian is perceived to be (i.e. a difficult distribution). -- Besos, Marga -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e8bbf0361003241108h4a66i46aef04dd7611...@mail.gmail.com
Q for the Candidates: How many users?
Hi *, Bearing in mind: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users? (Or, if by the time you've read this some of the other candidates have already responded, how would you adjust their estimate/s?) Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns a...@erisian.com.au -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87b3a4191003220019q3000ef20ya5cb4753890fd...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
Anthony Towns wrote: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the usage of pocon, and should Debian do so, too? -- Bernd ZeimetzDebian GNU/Linux Developer http://bzed.dehttp://www.debian.org GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4ba7703b.8000...@bzed.de
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
Bernd Zeimetz be...@bzed.de writes: Anthony Towns wrote: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the usage of pocon, and should Debian do so, too? Enforce? Would the OS deactivate itself if you didn't run popcon? :) We're running somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 Debian stable servers. I'm afraid running popcon on them is a non-starter so far due to concerns about information exposure. When this was previously discussed on debian-devel, it became clear that we're far from the only ones in that situation. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ocig3xi5@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 05:19:20PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: Hi *, Bearing in mind: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users? Raw guess: around a million. - Installations != users - Not all users install popcon - Installations on mainframes or LAN servers usually have several users. I'm not going to count web server users (then the whole Internet-using world is probably a Debian user), but if they have an account on the system, I think you can call them a 'Debian user', even if they don't know. Given that, a ratio of 10 users to one popcon result seems more or less appropriate (Or, if by the time you've read this some of the other candidates have already responded, how would you adjust their estimate/s?) None of them have, apparently. Would be interesting to see that, though :-) -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
* Russ Allbery r...@debian.org, 2010-03-22, 13:35:
* www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our
users and free software,
* popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions,
* popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and
* that this is something of a trick question,
That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the
usage of pocon, and should Debian do so, too?
Enforce? Would the OS deactivate itself if you didn't run popcon? :)
We're running somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 Debian stable servers.
I'm afraid running popcon on them is a non-starter so far due to concerns
about information exposure. When this was previously discussed on
debian-devel, it became clear that we're far from the only ones in that
situation.
/etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest is a conffile and you can easily
customize it. For example, I'm using something like this:
run_popcon()
{
hidden=`apt-forktracer | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | tr '\n' '|' | sed -e
's/[|]$//'`
su -s /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/popularity-contest nobody | grep -v -w -E --
$hidden
}
which prevents exposing packages from outside of the archive.
--
Jakub Wilk
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Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 02:27:23PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: Anthony Towns wrote: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the usage of pocon, and should Debian do so, too? I don't know whether Ubuntu does that; and frankly, I don't think it holds any relevance to what we do. As to whether we should 'enforce' popcon, the answer is a clear 'no' to me. Firstly, we can't enforce anything -- we provide Free Software, which by definition can be modified to remove anything we would like to 'enforce'. Secondly, I don't think popcon is so important that we should require it from our users. It is a good idea to strongly suggest that it be installed, and our current installer does that. But beyond that? No. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
[ I reply here to both Anthony and Bernd questions, which are very much
intertwined. ]
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 05:19:20PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
* www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our
users and free software,
* popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions,
* popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and
* that this is something of a trick question,
What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users?
I'm not going to give an actual estimate because I lack a significant
amount of needed data and, frankly speaking, I don't see why the
exercise of actually arriving at a number might be interesting as
campaigning material (if I'm missing something fundamental about why it
is so, please explain).
Nevertheless, I'll tell you what I'd do to arrive at one, and share
right now with you the impression that it would indeed be useful to have
at least a more precise lower-bound than current popcon. That, however,
I don't think has anything to do with our priorities are our users and
free software: that is true no matter how many users we have; the
usefulness of estimates/lower-bounds is way more pragmatic than that.
Before being able to do an actual estimate, we should arrive at a
reasonable lower-bound on the number of our users (ah, BTW, with users
I actually mean installations, rather than people). Popcon recent
votes is a good start. Then we can look at the official mirrors logs
(for distinct IPs regularly downloading package indexes in a given time
window), and at the same index downloads for security.d.o (which is
enabled by default and most likely not accessed via mirrors). Having all
these data, I doubt we can do best than taking the maximum of them, as
how much they overlap is not clear a priori.
Starting from these raw data, arriving at an actual estimate is
absolutely tricky and I doubt it is solvable at all by attempting some
wild estimates. For instance, I'm aware of a couple of recent research
studies on how to estimate the user base of a _single_ open source
development project by modeling and then projecting the temporal pattern
of downloads just after each release. I'm not aware of any application
of similar techniques to distribution package downloads, which have
quite a lot of specificities.
All in all, I believe it is more interesting to see how our user base
changes over time than knowing its actual size. I've already reported in
a previous thread on -vote [1] about the study by Gaudenz Steinlin
showing that our user base has been decreasing steadily since the first
release of Ubuntu (whose users you might want to consider as Debian
users or not). That aspect is definitely worrisome and I've discussed
what I believe is our better countermeasure against that (communicating
better about our distinguishing values).
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2010/03/msg00143.html
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 02:27:23PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the
usage of pocon, and should Debian do so, too?
Eh, this has always been a controversial issue. popcon is very useful
for a lot of QA tasks and those are way more important than estimating
our user base.
I personally think that it would be reasonable to have popcon offering
an opt-out configuration step, rather than an opt-in one. Nevertheless,
even if I were the popcon maintainer---which I'm not---I would not dare
making the change in isolation, because I know it has been a very
controversial topic in the past. For this reason I'm fine with the
current default (as I've stated in a different thread: one should always
balance the potential benefits of a technical change with its social
impact).
All in all, this is probably a topic where a quick and easy
devotee-based poll might show where the DD body stands in the trade-off
between the advantages and disadvantages of enabling popcon submissions
by default, and finally get this discussion past us.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:45:13PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 02:27:23PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: Anthony Towns wrote: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the usage of pocon, and should Debian do so, too? I don't know whether Ubuntu does that; and frankly, I don't think it holds any relevance to what we do. OTOH, if popcon is mandatory on Ubuntu, it means the popcon result for Ubuntu more or less reflects the number of Ubuntu users. It also means that, according to your estimate of the number of Debian users, Ubuntu is not as far ahead as at least I would have thought. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100322205055.ga4...@glandium.org
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On 22 March 2010 20:50, Mike Hommey m...@glandium.org wrote: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:45:13PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 02:27:23PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: Anthony Towns wrote: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the usage of pocon, and should Debian do so, too? I don't know whether Ubuntu does that; and frankly, I don't think it holds any relevance to what we do. OTOH, if popcon is mandatory on Ubuntu, it means the popcon result for Ubuntu more or less reflects the number of Ubuntu users. It also means that, according to your estimate of the number of Debian users, Ubuntu is not as far ahead as at least I would have thought. Mike Popcon is not enabled by default in Ubuntu. There is a tickbox in advance button during installation to enable it as well as in synaptic (like on debian). With regards, Dima. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/86ecb3c71003221412n384b7ce8ofc750db0bcf92...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 02:27:23PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's priorities are our users and free software, * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, That results in a different question for me: Does Ubuntu enforce the usage of pocon, God, no. and should Debian do so, too? God, no. :) On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:50:55PM +0100, Mike Hommey wrote: OTOH, if popcon is mandatory on Ubuntu, it means the popcon result for Ubuntu more or less reflects the number of Ubuntu users. It also means that, according to your estimate of the number of Debian users, Ubuntu is not as far ahead as at least I would have thought. http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/123481/index.html -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
Russ Allbery r...@debian.org writes: Bernd Zeimetz be...@bzed.de writes: Anthony Towns wrote: * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and * that this is something of a trick question, […] We're running somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 Debian stable servers. I'm afraid running popcon on them is a non-starter so far due to concerns about information exposure. When this was previously discussed on debian-devel, it became clear that we're far from the only ones in that situation. Right. One possible explanation for such a low popcon result for Debian is that those who are concerned about popcon exposure also want fine control in many other areas, including support for many marginally-popular packages, and so selectively prefer Debian. Those hosts would therefore not show up on either list. Other explanations are possible, of course. -- \ “Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except | `\for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand | _o__) knowledge.” —Erwin Knoll | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/874ok7swwa@benfinney.id.au
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
Ben Finney ben+deb...@benfinney.id.au writes: Russ Allbery r...@debian.org writes: We're running somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 Debian stable servers. I'm afraid running popcon on them is a non-starter so far due to concerns about information exposure. When this was previously discussed on debian-devel, it became clear that we're far from the only ones in that situation. Right. One possible explanation for such a low popcon result for Debian is that those who are concerned about popcon exposure also want fine control in many other areas, including support for many marginally-popular packages, and so selectively prefer Debian. Those hosts would therefore not show up on either list. Other explanations are possible, of course. I suppose I shouldn't really be discussing this too much since it's a question for the DPL candidates rather than a general discussion topic, but I can't refrain from pointing out something else: my personal goal for Debian is not for it to be the most popular distribution. It's for it to be the best distribution, for a definition of best agreed upon by the people who work on it. In other words, in the grand open source tradition, we're creating something for the broad community, but in the process we're largely solving our personal problems and scratching our personal itches. I want Debian to continue to be an excellent server operating system that I can use for Stanford University's internal IT infrastructure. If it changed in a way that made it a bad server operating system but made it much more popular in the broad sense, that to me would be a bug, not a feature. Obviously insofar as we can, we all want Debian to be all things to all people, and I think we all owe each other an obligation to try to find good solutions for everything that people want to use Debian for, among those people who are working on it. But, even acknowledging good questions about how to attract new contributors, I don't think pure popularity should be a driving goal for the project, and certainly shouldn't override other goals such as sound technical judgement. AJ's question, and particularly his other longer response to the question about disappearing DPLs, really highlight what I think are some disagreements between he and I about how we see Debian. I fundamentally do not believe in the grow or die model or think that projects need to constantly move on to the next shiny thing. I don't believe in it for economies, I don't believe in it for businesses, and I don't believe in it for Debian. I don't think that's a goal to pursue (or, for that matter, to not pursue). I'd much rather focus on doing good work and encouraging and mentoring contributors and letting metrics like total user count do whatever they do. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/874ok727ba@windlord.stanford.edu
