Hi, all, I generally just lurk on this list (as I'm not a TU), but figured I might throw in a couple of cents to this discussion, since there's some talk about statistics, and I have a strong statistical background. Oh, and as it turns out, "a few cents" ends up being something like a dollar. Sorry for the long post, but I'm trying to be thorough. Some of the points that have already been made: (Yes, everybody hates a recap. Deal.) - The current votes system is insufficient as a valid means of determining how many people *really* use a package, because not all users vote. - pkgstats hasn't been around long enough to have generated as much information as folks would like. (And, again, not everybody has installed/used it). - A system for reliably working out what packages have a sufficiently large user base in Arch to justify inclusion in [community] would be a very nice thing to have. My thought is basically that the best way to get decent usage stats for a given package is to implement a pkg-download counter (yes, I know this has been suggested). Unfortunately, this raises some technical issues. Particularly (read: off the top of my head), we'd need a mechanism to account for fringe cases such as people who, say, accidentally remove or break a PKGBUILD and re-download five minutes later, and the (probably/hopefully much more rare) people who would repeatedly download a PKGBUILD in order to artificially inflate its usage statistics. These could probably be taken care of with, say, an IP-address recorder (but that of course raises privacy issues of its own) or requiring users to login in order to download (which I *don't* think is a good idea; it has wa-a-a-a-ay too many obvious drawbacks). It would also be useful not to double-count people who are merely updating to a new version, and to have some means of keeping track of people who have *removed* packages. Pkgstats is a good start in the direction of keeping reliable statistics. Some ideas for making that more prevalent are: - Including a new, well-publicized (so people know they can turn it off) function in pacman that would (optionally, default=yes) to automagically send in installed/removed pkgs (and I suppose a complete list the first time it's run) to something like Debian's popularity-contest server. - Supplementing pkgstats data, where lacking, with data from Debian's popularity-contest server. - Adding a cronjob for pkgstats (again, enabled by default). - Adding a feature to pkgstats that would also *save* the full list it has sent in (preferably to a compressed file, but whatever), and then next time it's run, check against the saved list--packages that have been removed are removed from this master list, and packages that have been added are, well, added to the list. Something like a diff would then be sent in. - Adding pkgstats to the install CD as an optional, but useful, package. So. That's all I can think of on this for now, but if folks would like statistics advice, I'm on this and a couple arch lists, and feel free to CC me on the email or whatever just to get my attention. If someone has specific questions about something or about something I said here, ask! And I'd be glad to help with implementing...whatever gets decided. Thanks for reading this far! Ivy P.S.: For what it's worth, I agree that the actual vote should be tabled until there are one or more solid, researched proposals (which needn't take more than a week or two!). (And not to downplay the actual suggestion in question!) And I'd be glad to help out with that, too, though again I'm not a TU. (-: -- If I Ever Become An Evil Villainess... 46. If an advisor says to me "My liege, the heroine is but one person. What can one person possibly do?" I will reply "This," and kill the advisor.