On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 08:04:42AM +0000, Simon Hobson wrote: > As for Debian, they have the popularity contest which I believe is > supposed to gather stats on what people are running. I don't know how > it works, does anyone know if it would pick up something like > Shorewall which is only actually executed occasionally but is > effectively 'in use' just about the whole time a machine is running ?
Yes. It looks at the atime stamps for stuff that's been run in the past 30 days; frequency doesn't matter. Also it reports on stuff that's installed, regardless of usage. Current results: of approximately 30000 installations currently sending popularity-contest results, about 1000 have shorewall installed and about 600 are using it regularly. A few well-known packages with similar popularity (in the 500-700 bracket): valgrind, lprng, timidity, fvwm, dovecot. The Debian popcon results are usually a moderately good predictor of what sysadmins are running on all linux-based platforms, excluding large corporate server farms (and ignoring desktop users who don't have a proper sysadmin). Shorewall is likely to be used on a similar fraction of the linux hosts run by real sysadmins - that's a pretty large number. Users are like ants. There's always lots more hiding under the ground (and if you start digging, they get everywhere and ruin a perfectly good lunch; leave them alone). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Shorewall-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/shorewall-users
