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

[Aaron Bull Schaefer]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wouldn't say that. I would say that the only users who matter are the
> ones that participate. For example you can't justly complain about the
> results of an election if you haven't educated yourself about it and
> voted.

The thing is, we're not voting on a single package that we feel is
better than another package, so we're not looking for informed
opinions...we're trying to establish objective/accurate usage numbers
for every single package across all Arch Linux users (or at least a
statistically appropriate sample of Arch Linux users), which is
unrelated to people's activity in the community.


> Let's be clear here. This isn't about removal of packages. It's about
> moving packages from one repo to another. Community to aur/unsupported.

I don't think there's any confusion over these semantics, and I'd
point out that there's a large difference between moving a package
from Community to Unsupported compared with moving a package from
Extra to Community. The fact that Community packages are available by
default to all Arch users in binary form is a huge plus...the AUR is a
fantastic resource, but there's no built-in way for users to track
changes in Unsupported automatically. Also, moving packages from
Community to Unsupported can be confusing for users who are expecting
binary updates and don't use a wrapper like yaourt that will tell them
about the updates after we remove packages from Community.

--
Aaron "ElasticDog" Schaefer