On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 23:38 -0800, Drew Frank wrote:
2. Both vote counts and pkgstats statistics, as they are currently generated, are flawed metrics of package popularity.
3. Nearly all of the controversy over various [Community] admission policies stems from the fact that different people place different levels of trust in the information provided by votes and pkgstats.
I feel like I'm a bit late to the party, but unless there is a critical need to act now my recommendation would be to first set up a system whereby accurate usage statistics are obtained and then proceed to develop policy based on accurate, interpretable statistics.
How do you want to measure the usage correctly? Then we would need a community-layer to pacman wo notifies AUR whenever a package from community is installed or deleted. But that won't happen due to privacy concerns.