Some time ago, there was some flamewars^H^Hdebate about the Release Team’s removals of RC-buggy packages from testing. Basically, some people claimed that popular packages shouldn’t be removed, even if RC-buggy.<\/p>\n
But, do we really miss popular packages in testing?<\/p>\n
It’s difficult to know. You could get the popcon data, and compare it with the Packages files for testing and unstable. Or work with source packages (which removes a lot of noise), but then, you have to convert the popcon data (which uses binary packages names) to source packages. Not completely trivial.<\/p>\n
That’s where the Ultimate Debian Database GSOC project<\/b> comes to the rescue. The goal of Christian von Essen’s project is to gather data from various sources in Debian into a single SQL DB, so queries that combine all those data sources can easily be written.<\/p>\n
For example, here is the query that lists the source packages that are in unstable, but not in testing, sorted by their popcon (using the number of insts of the most popular binary package of the source package as value for the source package):<\/p>\n
SELECT DISTINCT unstable.package, insts\r\nFROM (SELECT DISTINCT package FROM sources\r\nWHERE distribution = 'debian' and release = 'sid') AS unstable, popcon_src\r\nWHERE unstable.package NOT IN (\r\n SELECT package FROM sources\r\n WHERE distribution = 'debian' AND release = 'lenny')\r\nAND popcon_src.source = unstable.package ORDER BY insts DESC;\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/p>\n