[aur-general] pkgstats and unused [community] packages

[Ray Rashif]

On 26 October 2010 10:38, Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon 25 Oct 2010 19:46 +0200, Xyne wrote:
>> Brieuc ROBLIN wrote:
>>
>> > On 25 October 2010 15:06, Florian Pritz <bluewind at server-speed.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > > On 25.10.2010 12:35, Christopher Brannon wrote:
>> > > > I've been polling <https://archlinux.de/?page=PackageStatistics>
>> > > > regularly for several weeks, and I've noticed that roughly 50% of the
>> > > > packages in [community] are not installed by anyone.
>> > >
>> > > The page doesn't show the whole database.
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > > Florian Pritz -- {flo,bluewind}@server-speed.net<bluewind%7D at server-speed.net>
>> > >
>> > >
>> > Is there a way to get the whole database ? Would be cool if we could play
>> > with the raw statistics from pkgstat ;)
>>
>> Not all users submit stats so unless Arch installs spyware on
>> everyone's system or pools download stats from the mirrors, those
>> states are not sufficient to motivate removals.
>
> Well, I've argued in the past that if not enough users care enough to
> give feedback to the developers about what they care about in the
> distro, either through votes, or pkgstats, or some other way then it's
> not something that the devs should have to worry about.

Yes, Allan has also mentioned this in the pkgstats thread [1].

The factor here is the criteria for packages entering community. We
say more than 10 votes OR 1% usage, but these cannot correlate.

Users contributing to votes may not necessarily be contributing to
usage statistics. Even if they did, most often they'd account for less
than 1% of the usage pool, even for a package with 50 votes.

[1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=831180#p831180