http://people.debian.org/~ballombe/popcon/ was meant to replace http://people.debian.org/~apenwarr/popcon/
Avery Pennarun's page (apenwarr) has been reportedly broken in the past. I'm unsure as to it's current accuracy, as it's linked to from http://popcon.alioth.debian.org/ I would guess that it's been fixed. I appreciate the efforts of looking at what packages outside of main are used, but I don't think it proves much. I would however like to see kaffe fixed, a DFSG unrar (note the basic LZW patent is still in effect in Canada!), and a better DFSG pdf reader. As to the quality of j2re1.4 I would defer to debian-java. Blackdown has been making debs for quite a while now and I haven't heard many complaints (other than it's not in Debian or non-free). We have certainly been hurt by our current java implementations as packages like OpenOffice.org have to turn java off to get into main... It has been suggested in the past that it might be beneficial for packages in non-free to list free alternatives. I'd recommend filing wishlist bugs where possible. Please see the mailing list archives for comparisons of acroread vs the DFSG pdf readers that we have. It's interesting that the DFSG readers can't even support some of the pdf's that the old distributable acroread could. I haven't checked myself, but maybe things have changed? Take a look at the Maximum Compression comparison and you'll see that ppmd would be a good replacement for rar/unrar if only it were more widely used. Unfortunately it isn't so we should probably look at packaging a DFSG unrar package. I believe there was discussion on DFSG archive tools in debian-devel last year sometime that brought about the addition of some new packages. Drew Daniels
