Aaron Griffin wrote:
My succinct conclusions: . Everybody agreed that we weren't able to find a statistically relevant way to calculate package usage. . Imposing limits, albeit relaxed, on TUs will, in my opinion, demotivate many of them. I'll be the first to feel demotivated. . We are using as a reference the pkgstats results that came from very few days of usage. If we really want to put arbitrary limits, then they should be discussed after *at least* one month of pkgstats running. I already wonder: did results change from when we started the discussion?
<snip>
better exploit the mean of voting, and get more useful numbers. . Don't put any hard limits at all, just encourage contructive discussion and communication between TUs themselves, the community and devs. I personally trust all of you TUs and I think that, by better defining what our goals are and how we want our repo to be, we can solve this problem without much hassle.
<snip>
Thayer proposed adding flagging for packages that would indicate: a) that it doesn't follow packaging standards and b) that it is "rotting" or no longer useful. This would do a few things: clean up the repo, keep TU motivation up, and still allow us to get new-fangled packages in the community repo.
The thing I like about this is that a lot of times, something new comes out (say dwm) and people are all "omg I want to try it!" but want it to be easy. That initial popularity seems, theoretically, enough to move it into community. But the popularity of a lot of these new-fangled apps tends to wane quickly. It makes sense to have a package like this in community as soon as one can put it there, but we need checks and balances to decide if it should be removed.
i like this idea, but i have a concern. i think better statistics are essential for a successful long-term solution to this problem. however, i think a technical fix will only go so far; there are *social* problems that will limit any technical fix. example 1: votes are unreliable because voting users are not a representative sample. example 2: flagging packages as anything doesn't guarantee any course of action, in any of the repositories. bitlbee, in [extra] is 0.2.1 versions behind the upstream release. it has been flagged-out-of-date. the maintainer has been contacted individually. an updated pkgbuild has been sent to the maintainer and posted on the forums. but it's only getting older in [extra]. on the one hand we have users not availing themselves of the participation mechanisms that are available. on the other hand there are maintainers not responding to those users who do follow-through. so, while the aaron/thayer amendment to the proposal (or is it a separate proposal?) provides a couple useful new statistical measures, i don't see that it would actually generate better statistics. several ideas have been floated to solve this particular problem, like download statistics. those all need more consideration and development, though. it seems to me that there won't be any real consensus on a concrete proposal to regulate [community] until there's a mechanism for generating accurate, reliable usages statistics. i would anticipate a close vote; given the furor that's surrounded this proposal, i would also anticipate a lot of bad feeling on both sides arising from a close, binding vote. if i were a tu, i'd move to table this proposal and form a working group to study the social and technical problems of generating good usage statistics. it would put off a resolution to the resource consumption problems, but i feel that, sometimes, "now" is not better than "better." in the meantime, it seems that moving all the games out of [community] and into [games] is one concrete and non-controversial way to take some load off the server. sorry to go on at length, especially as i'm not even a tu. yrs, kludge