> Can we agree that active developers are good for Gentoo,
Yes
> and the more the better?
If they are co-operating or working on separate projects, not if they are
competing and flaming.
> I think other posters to this thread may be trying to compile a
> similar set of statistics, but I'll just come out and say it. Can we
> compare historical data on the number of Gentoo users and the rate of
> Gentoo maintenance and growth?
Number of users is largely irrelevant, it's not as if Gentoo needs a
number of "customers" to survive, it is a non-profit organisation
producing free products.
That's exactly the argument here, and the point of creating the 3-way
comparison I suggested. I'm trying to determine if Gentoo does "need
a number of customers to survive", to thrive, or not at all. If you
are all correct, an increased user base would not benefit Gentoo, but
there is a possibility that it would and has. That's what I'm trying
to determine.
The latter number is more interesting, and
should be available from places like Gentoo's CVS repositories and the
site Bo mentioned earlier in this thread.
For a rough idea of the rate of development, look at the portage snapshots
on the install CDs over the years and count the packages. Of course, mere
number cannot quantify things like the improvements in the quality of the
software.
It's clear that no one source of data will serve to represent any of
the three desired plot-lines: users, rate of maintenance, and rate of
growth. In that case, some type of composite score for each is in
order. Can anyone suggest sources of data for each composite score?
In addition to or in lieu of the composite scores, the individual data
points could be compared to each other for a more fine-grained set of
statistics.
Users
- bouncer.gentoo.org activity
- mailing list activity
- forum activity
- general website activity
- Gentoo Store data
Rate of Maintenance
- ratio of opened bugs to closed bugs
- other bugs.gentoo.org info
Rate of Growth
- CVS repository data
- info from http://cia.navi.cx/
- number of packages in old portage snapshots
Please post additions or modifications to the above list, especially
pertaining to the rate of growth. A real developer should be able to
better determine the specific data to use in that estimation.
- Grant
--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
