First, thanks to all the participants for the input. For the purpose of processing the data, any "~" was interpreted as "no" (except for David Jensen's "[~] I am an editor" answer), and some vote marks were corrected if they contradict the words placed near them. E.g., Vladimir A. Pavlov didn't place a mark near the "I will ignore the future LFS advice on package management if it Can't be applied on a busy machine where many files are accessed/modified every minute" item, but did say "I will definitely ignore any package manager using "find" to create a package file list", so I counted his vote as though it had the mark.
So, here are the results. They indicate the current state of the project and should in no way influence its progress directly. First, a lot of options were just red herrings (e.g., almost the whole "I use the following features" section) to mask my intentions. You are free to interpret them as you wish, though. Second, the part about the currently used package management technique almost failed, because many people answered about their non-LFS systems, or more than once without indicating the number of machines to which each option applies. For analysis, correlation coefficients were calculated between each pair of available options, except those to which people answer too similarly, e.g. "I use dpkg" (in this case the correlation coefficients are badly defined). Below, correlation coefficients with a checkbox are not shown if 3 or less people have this checkbox unchecked, or 3 or less people have this checkbox checked. Correlation coefficients with the absolute value above 0.3 (arbitrary unscientific number chosen just to limit the output) are listed below. Some of them are obvious, some aren't. Correlation coefficients of any checkbox with itself (1.00 by definition) and of roundboxes in the "I use this kind of PM" area between each other are not shown. 0.65: "I use the clean-uninstallation feature"/"I use PM for removal of obsolete files" 0.53: "I use PM for removal of obsolete files"/"I use PM to revert mistakes" 0.53: "I use PM to revert mistakes"/"I won't use PM that clobbers config files" 0.51: "I want to know where each file comes from"/"I use PM for removal of obsolete files" 0.50: "I use the clean-uninstallation feature"/"I use PM to revert mistakes" 0.49: "I use the scripting feature of PM"/"I won't use PM that clobbers config files" 0.48: "I trust the book"/"I will ignore PM that fails on busy system" 0.45: "I will ignore PM that doesn't allow package transfer"/"I won't use PM that clobbers config files" 0.44: "I use PM to compile once, deploy everywhere"/"I will ignore PM that doesn't allow package transfer" 0.43: "I use the scripting feature of PM"/"I will ignore PM that doesn't allow package transfer" 0.43: "I deviate from LFS"/"I use simple DESTDIR-based binary packages" 0.43: "I want to know where each file comes from"/"I use the clean-uninstallation feature" 0.41: "I am an editor"/"I use the scripting feature of PM" -0.41: "I use PM for removal of obsolete files"/"I will ignore any instructions on PM" 0.41: "I use PM to revert mistakes"/"I use the scripting feature of PM" -0.41: "I won't use PM that clobbers config files"/"I will ignore any instructions on PM" -0.40: "I rebuild often"/"I want to know where each file comes from" 0.39: "I am an editor"/"I use timestamp+find-based PM" 0.39: "I rebuild often"/"I will ignore PM that fails on busy system" 0.39: "I use simple binary packages"/"I use PM to revert mistakes" 0.39: "I use simple binary packages"/"I will ignore PM that fails on busy system" 0.38: "I deviate from LFS"/"I use PM to compile once, deploy everywhere" -0.37: "I use LFS on >1 PC"/"I use PM for removal of obsolete files" -0.36: "User-based PM"/"I use PM to revert mistakes" -0.35: "User-based PM"/"I won't use PM that clobbers config files" 0.35: "I am an editor"/"I want to know where each file comes from" 0.35: "I am an editor"/"I use the clean-uninstallation feature" -0.34: "I use LFS on >1 PC"/"I use the clean-uninstallation feature" 0.34: "I deviate from LFS"/"I deviate from BLFS" 0.34: "I deviate from LFS"/"I use the scripting feature of PM" -0.33: I use LFS as primary system"/"I will ignore PM that doesn't allow package transfer" 0.33: "I use PM to revert mistakes"/"I will ignore PM that fails on busy system" 0.32: "I use PM for upgrading toolchain easily"/"I use PM to compile once, deploy everywhere" 0.32: "I will ignore PM that fails on busy system"/"I will ignore PM with non-bash syntax" -0.31: "I trust the book"/"I want to know where each file comes from" -0.31: "I trust the book"/"I use the clean-uninstallation feature" 0.31: "I use PM for removal of obsolete files"/"I won't use PM that clobbers config files" Now the important, in my opinion, parts: DESTDIR-based techniques are not as popular as others! So we have to learn them first before writing about them. Probably, this happens because the current LFS book is not really suited to DESTDIR. See also the high correlation coefficient (0.43) between this and deviation from LFS. The "I rebuild often" and "I use the scripting feature of the PM" checkboxes are not correlated (-0.06). I find this strange and cannot explain. The deviation rates from both LFS and BLFS are not correlated to the editor status. Thus, we can say that the community is not split. It is surprising that a lot of users (among both editors and non-editors) will accept a totally broken package manager that overwrites their customizations of the configuration files. This indicates that they probably didn't try to implement package management themselves (or didn't even package stuff for regular distributions) and thus didn't meet the problem. Existence of such users that can't tell a key property of a good PM will surelly negatively affect the quality of the resulting pages in LFS. I.e., again, we have to learn more about package management before attempting to write about it. -- Alexander E. Patrakov -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
