Comments for Lucas Nussbaum's Blog

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Yaroslav Halchenko

Yaroslav Halchenko — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:37:04 +0000

FWIW — here would be the plot scaled to 100% for every date point:
http://www.onerussian.com/tmp/releases.png
To scale I just did
rel[, 2:7] <- 100*rel[,2:7] / rowSums(rel[,2:7]) right after loading rel. Not sure if that is the R-kosher, but seems to work ;)

Thanks again Lucas for sharing.

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Lucas

Lucas — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:53:26 +0000

@Yaroslav: data.json pushed to git

(Yes, I did copy those 2 GB of data to be able to generate the results)

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Yaroslav Halchenko

Yaroslav Halchenko — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 03:03:19 +0000

on which box did you run it?

on the popov (poopcon itself) I get “Can’t locate JSON.pm” and I do not think it is worth shuffling 2GB of popcon results across the net

may be it is worth adding that data.json excerpt to the git — it shouldn’t be large

it would be nice to get a plot

- scaled to 100% so we really look at ratios

- add “end of support” for each (well — lenny) release… I do not see the desired inflection line upon stopped support (lenny in Feb 2012), which suggests that people keep running older releases despite lacking security support (worrisome)

it is a very nice idea and we should assure of having new versions of popcon for each release! ;-) Thanks

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Paul Wise

Paul Wise — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:56:12 +0000

Warren: people running Debian on servers are Debian users too, popcon isn’t specific to desktop/workstation users. I would say you seem to have misunderstood the intent.

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Warren

Warren — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 17:17:24 +0000

I report popcon stats on my workstations, but almost never on my servers. My understanding of the goals of popcon was to better understand user preferences. A server that is: base + postfix + one of: [TeX, Samba, etc] + organization local/specific packages really isn’t very interesting from a reporting perspective. A workstation where I have tried to find a MP3 player or games that I like (and usually removed the ones I don’t), has more reporting value.

Have I mis-understood the intent of popcon, or are you trying to use the data in a way it wasn’t quite intended?

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Thijs

Thijs — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 11:46:57 +0000

Agreed with Russ – if you start a new project now you may start out your server on Wheezy, as it will probably not have many disruptive changes anymore and which will save you a dist-upgrade in the near future.

I’m not sure what you mean with this: “upgraded directly to testing, and switched back to tracking stable after the release”. As we all use codenames in our sources list, when you install wheezy and wheezy gets released, there’s no “switching back to tracking stable after the release”, but rather “continuing to use wheezy”.

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Russ Allbery

Russ Allbery — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 20:36:10 +0000

We start switching servers to testing towards the tail end of the release freeze when we need newer software, and leave those servers on stable after the release. I suspect lots of people do the same. (We also update all servers on oldstable to stable starting as soon as stable is finalized, whether they need it or not.)

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Bob Proulx

Bob Proulx — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 17:55:09 +0000

It looks to me that the number of Stable Squeeze installations is increasing. It appears to be increasing at the same rate that Lenny and Etch installations are decreasing. Making it appear that people are slowly rolling previous releases forward to the current release.

What surprises me is the nice smooth curve of decreasing use after a release. The top is always up and down but the bottom is always smooth. Interesting.

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Sylvain Le Gall

Sylvain Le Gall — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:12:26 +0000

I think that when you start a new project that needs a server, you end up using testing because it contains the most recent soft/lib and you need them. When the project ends you don’t need anymore to upgrade your requirement, so stable is fine.

I think there are a very few projects that initially target the software available in stable and rather target the one in unstable (more or less what you can find in testing).

Comment on Debian releases used by popcon participants by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:25:56 +0000

All I can speak to is what I do.

With my desktop, I run unstable.

With servers I run stable unless the next stable release looks to be less than six months out, in which case I run testing via the codename of the next release. I then rarely update to the next release. I still have some etch servers. They’re all due for a migration to VMs running wheezy, though.

I haven’t upgraded mainly because of the PHP4 to PHP5 transition and not having time to fix existing code.But now the hardware is failing and I don’t have a choice. :(

Michael