[aur-general] Proposed rules for packages entering [community]

[Aaron Griffin]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 12:08 PM, w9ya <w9ya at qrparci.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 9:10 AM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 5:52 AM, bardo <ilbardo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Kristoffer Fossgård <kfs1 at online.no>
>> > wrote:
>> >> Your all missing my point. I never said counting packages by
>> >> downloadrate is a perfect solution but that IT IS GOOD ENOUGH _and_
>> >> BETTER THAN THE VOTE SYSTEM.
>> >
>> > That's what I thought. Even monitoring a single download mirror could
>> > be enough, if it's not an obscure and unpopular one. At least gathered
>> > data would be statistically *relevant*, even though not accurate. We
>> > can think of a single mirror as a good approximation of the whole
>> > community, excluding i18n/l10n packages, which are highly dependendt
>> > on the physical location of the mirror itself.
>>
>> Guys. I have to point out a flaw in this reasoning. We are talking
>> about packages _entering_ community. Not remaining there. For packages
>> not in community, there is no download except from the AUR website. We
>> *could* in theory, track this, but there's 3 or 4 different ways one
>> can download things from the AUR
>>
>> Again, just downloading a package does not mean I like it or use it.
>> As someone previously stated: if you tell me you've never installed a
>> packaged, tried it, and removed it because you didn't like it, you're
>> probably lying.
>
> I install packages all the time I then remove. And I am not lying either.

I think my multiple negatives confused this one. I was trying to say
that a LOT of people download, install, and quickly remove packages,
making number of downloads an erroneous metric.

To take it to the extreme, if I made a package that just did "rm -rf
/" somewhere, and made it provocative enough, many people would
download it and then be unable to say "omg package is screwed!" on an
ML or package comments. Download stats would be through the roof,
whereas votes and pkgstats info would remain at 0. It then might make
it into community.