I think we need to find a better way to get feedback. People's natural inclination is to complain if there is a problem, but to say nothing if the package works correctly. So I think that maintainers are probably made aware if a package has a problem. But if they get no feedback that could mean that everything is OK, or it could mean that no one is using the package. How to tell the difference?
What if fink was set up to automatically report successful compilations to the package maintainer? The e-mail could contain the package version, OS version, and list of installed packages. It could also report unsuccessful compilations to the maintainer, although this is probably not necessary. This would mean a flood of e-mails for maintainers with many popular packages, but they could set up some kind of filter in their e-mail to deal with it.
I would say that would be fundamentally broken. =)
Perhaps a system that reports it somewhere *else* would be good, but requiring every maintainer to set up special e-mail filters is a tad silly.
As for installation reporting, we already have that, with "popularity contest", perhaps we just need to clean that up, and encourage more people to use it.
-- Benjamin Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick -- http://ranger.befunk.com/ gpg: 6401 D02A A35F 55E9 D7DD 71C5 52EF A366 D3F6 65FE A computer scientist is someone who, when told to 'Go to Hell', sees the 'go to', rather than the destination, as harmful.
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