[Popcon-developers] popcon & derivatives

[Paul Wise]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 10:21 PM, Bill Allombert wrote:

> They did not contain the relevant informations.

I suggest you file a bug asking for it to be added.

> So essentially the derivatives either use Debian version or Ubuntu version.

Basically.

> Do you have data on how much their Packages files differ from Debian ?

Some, but no statistics yet. Here are my thoughts:

A bunch of derivatives are an overlay, where their packages are
intended to be used with Debian's archive.

Others like Ubuntu are complete systems with many new, repackaged and
altered packages.

Most derivatives change relatively few packages, Ubuntu being the
biggest exception.

Here is the source data:

http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census

I use some code and the snapshots.d.o filesystem and database to check
whether packages have ever been in Debian and if not what Debian
packages they may have been derived from.

http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Integration

The results are the sources.* files here and in the per-derivative
subdirectories. sources.new lists packages where the heuristics
couldn't find a base package. sources.patches lists the packages that
were probably derived from Debian in some way and where they were
possibly derived from. The scripts don't yet detect packages that were
completely repackaged, but I plan to look at that at some point. You
can get some vague idea by looking at the size of these two files.

http://dex.alioth.debian.org/census/

Caveats:

Some distros have no public apt repository or don't have a
sources.list on their census pages.

The sources.list snippets may be incomplete for some repos.

Some derivatives don't use Debian source packages to generate binary packages.

> The computation of the popcon vote relies on the dependencies graphs. Without
> the knowledge of the derivatives Packages files, the votes are not computed
> accurately.

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. How does popcon deal with unknown
packages then? Also, wnpp.d.n uses popcon vote info to annotate
RFP/ITP/etc bugs:

http://wnpp.debian.net/?type[]=ITP&type[]=RFP&sort=installs;desc

> But anyway, all the more reason to add a vendor field, I guess.

Sounds like I may have convinced you, great :)

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise