[Popcon-developers] popcon & derivatives

[Paul Wise]

Ah, the whole idea behind including dpkg vendor information was to
make sure we could tell derivatives users from Debian users so we
could ensure derivative users do not influence the Debian statistics.
For the initial stage I assumed reports from derivatives users would
be saved but be skipped during report processing, I guess that isn't
the case yet? I figured later down the track we could work out how to
include derivatives in the processing and how to display them
separately on the website.

The reason I suggest the version number stuff is that not all
derivatives are using the latest version of popcon and not all of them
will be setting the dpkg vendor correctly. Falling back to detecting
via the popcon version number will catch some users (admittedly few
right now).

If you wanted to do processing of reports from derivatives, the
derivatives census includes sources.list snippets and daily downloads
apt Packages/Sources for each of the derivatives we have in the wiki.
I think the census includes all of the vendors I've seen you mention
here as well as the ones listed with popcon version number extensions
on popcon.d.o.

The census scripts have some code to compare derivatives source
packages with source packages from snapshot.d.o. The code doesn't give
any percentage difference since it was aimed at getting patches.
Unfortunately due to one of the two machines behind snapshot.d.o being
down, this analysis has stopped. I'll add some stats once the server
returns but you can find the out-of-date data in the sources.* files
in the census scripts output, for example for Tanglu:

http://dex.alioth.debian.org/census/Tanglu/sources.patches
http://dex.alioth.debian.org/census/Tanglu/sources.new

I get the impression that more often than not, derivatives are about
changing the default package selection than about adding packages and
backports.

I'm happy to make any changes to the derivatives census scripts to
export any data needed for detection and or processing of derivatives
on popcon.d.o.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise