Neil Williams <codeh...@debian.org> writes: > On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:24:58 +0100 > Simon Josefsson <si...@josefsson.org> wrote: > >> Neil Williams <codeh...@debian.org> writes: >> >> >> Surely, it must be possible to get an estimate of the number of >> >> downloads of important packages and security updates? I know these >> >> downloads also are requested from mirror sites, but at least for the >> >> official mirror sites their relative activity must be known? >> > >> > How do you map the number of downloads to the number of users or >> > machines? >> >> It would establish an upper bound of well-administrated debian machines, >> I think. > > No, merely the number of installations which is not the same, clearly. > > Chroots can be entirely temporary. I regularly hammer the mirrors to > create test chroots last a matter of minutes. (Usually in a different > architecture each time, hence a proxy isn't much help.) > > It's not just chroots either - don't forget issues of local mirrors. > Download measurements cannot take account of whether the downloaded > file is actually installed or merely copied into another repository.
It would still provides an upper bound, but the local mirror exception is a good point. So the number derived from security.debian.org statistics would be 'an upper bound of the number of well-administrated debian installation that do not use local security mirrors'. I assume this number is correlated to the number of real debian installations (although I'm not sure we have a good definition of "real" here?). Merely the number of distinct IP addresses downloading a particular popular update from security.debian.org at least once would be interesting. /Simon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
