[aur-general] My thoughts on the [Community] policy discussion

[Drew Frank]

Hi all,

First off, I'd like to introduce myself so you can weigh my
observations appropriately. My name is Drew. I'm a casual Arch user,
and until recently my only experience with the AUR was using yaourt to
download and install packages (and pacman to install from [Community],
but I didn't really understand what that meant).  Recently I've been
following the discussion on this list regarding how to determine which
packages belong in [Community]. Despite my lack of Arch/AUR mastery,
I'd like to offer my two cents.

I claim:

1. If it were possible to know with certainty that a given package
were not in use by anybody (or only by a very small number of people),
there would be overwhelming agreement that the package does not belong
in [Community].

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.

Drew