Make the Debian CDs Better by Installing popcon

JayBonci writes "Not popcorn, popcon! (Short for popularity-contest) According to a recent message posted to debian-devel-announce, popcon numbers are being used to determine how things get arranged on the 13 CDs of the upcoming Debian stable release. Participation so far has been good, but the project could use more numbers from a broader user base. Please take a moment to install the package 'popularity-contest,' and help us make the distro better by allowing it to send us anonymous package usage statistics. You can see the results at Popularity Contest page."

Comments

This is a really good idea

[dealsites]

As a Linux newbie (currently don't have Linux installed, but have used it and plan to install it soon), it would be nice to know which are the most popular packages. Most people would like to have an idea of what the more experienced users use, and thus would like to try it themselves. In addition to knowing the most popular packages, it would probably be a quicker install be having the best ones at the beginning of the installation process instead of having to swap CDs too many times.

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Re:This is a really good idea

[ameoba]

The thing about the Debian install process is that you don't need all 13 CDs. After you do the base install, you scan the CDs that you feel like using and they get added to your local list of available packages (be it none, 1,2 or all 13). The first 2 CDs cover most of the stuff that you need to get the system working; by the time you get to the last disc, we're talking about some pretty obscure stuff that only has 3 users (2 of them are the devs and the 3rd is the guy making the package).

This is already a pretty reasonable distibution of files on the first 2 discs (the installer, OTOH still needs a lot of work; the new installer is a bit nicer than the old one but it doesn't really work all the time & there's some inconsistancies in it (like when you're partitioning drives, the drive labels in fdisk aren't the same as the names you see when you're assigning mountpoints to drives (which isn't even able to recognize swap devices as such & call them swap by default))) but it could always be perfected a bit. I have to wonder why they can't extract this from the logs on the mirrors tho...