On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 01:59:35PM -0500, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: > On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 08:04:31PM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote: > > > > * Total number of non-pseudo-packages that bugs.debian.org knows about. > > * Number of open bugs, in total, and for each severity, and a count of > > all non-wishlist, non-wontfix bugs. <snip several useful lines here> ... > > * Number of bugs opened or closed since the previous report. > > > (Snip mathematical proof of "Bogonic Quality Numbers" :) > > I would like to offer my completely worthless 2 cents here. > > I think that the aggregate statistics are OK. It will help to identify > trends in the distribution as a whole. They are not perfect, but then > no metric really is.
Once upon a time, I worked in the employment office, paying people unemployment benefit. An office senior manager retired: asked for some good advice he said, more or less "Never trust the official figures ..." and then recounted that, as a very junior manager in a small office many years before, he had been asked to try to fiddle figures for a month - to try to get round the system as an official test of how easy it would be to defraud/mislead the systems, audits, checks and balances. It was surprisingly easy - if you needed to employ young workers under 25, you'd concentrate on them to the detriment of everybody else for a week, if you needed to show good figures for disabled clients, you'd only interview disabled people for a week and postpone interviews with others ... Needless to say, the example was a good one: just because you _can_ prove anything with figures, doesn't mean you _should_ :) > > There are lots of other issues, but I will not go into those now. > > Now, my opinion on the "Bogonic Quality Numbers" is that they should be > left out entirely. The only thing worse than metrics is useless or > incorrect metrics. Because of the nature of software and the wide range > of packages in Debian, any attempt to assign a quality metric to a > particular package is probably not worthwhile. > Anything that will help get an overall picture will help, IMHO :) Thanks Lars, for some good ideas, All the best, Andy -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
