TheOldFellow wrote these words on 07/30/05 00:49 CST: > For after 6.1 - Has anyone thought about ways to measure usage of BLFS > packages - I'm not talking about popt, but courier vs postfix vs > sendmail or Gnome vs Kde vs a-small-and-beautiful-wm etc? > > LFS has the 'registered user' thing on the website - perhaps we could do > something similar, but of the major packages. Then we can drop things > that are (a) not used by any editor and (b) only used by people who > could do the build without help.
Something like this would be difficult, if not impossible. Trying to gather subjective information like you suggest is at the whim of folks being cooperative. We cannot count on that. Richard, if a vote was taken and KDE outweighed GNOME, would that be cause to remove GNOME from the book? I don't think so. Recently, Bruce asked if XFree should be removed. A couple of guys responded no. This, I hope, would be enough to keep it in the book. My reasons for suggesting that Courier be removed is due to the fact that the BLFS version of Courier is grossly behind and there seems to be no Editor interest in keeping it up. The BLFS instructions for Courier are no longer accurate for the last 7 revisions of the package. This can only lead to a support headache if we release a BLFS version with the current version of Courier. Can you think, or identify, just *one* other package that is similar to Courier in this respect? To summarize, I don't think there is any way to accurately measure who is using what packages, other than submit a survey. And a survey would surely be skewed due to user preference of those who decide to contribute to the survey. It is unrealistic to think that we could get an accurate measure of usage. It is up to Editors to decide what should be in BLFS and what should not be in BLFS. My only point with Courier is that there is no Editor that seems to be interested in keeping up with the package. I cannot think of one other package (Exim came to mind, but Bruce recently updated it) that isn't updated on a timely basis. I feel bad because Apache-Ant has had two quick releases and I have not yet updated the book. I will this weekend though. It is up to the Editors to keep the book current. -- Randy rmlscsi: [GNU ld version 2.15.94.0.2 20041220] [gcc (GCC) 3.4.3] [GNU C Library stable release version 2.3.4] [Linux 2.6.10 i686] 00:52:01 up 119 days, 25 min, 2 users, load average: 0.46, 0.18, 0.18 -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
