[gentoo-soc] Gentoostats Progress Report #4

[gentoo-soc] Gentoostats Progress Report #4

[G. Gaydarov]

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Hi everyone!

I usually send these reports every weekend but due to problems with my
email provider I've postponed this email until today. Sorry about this.

Brief summary
=============

The Gentoostats project aims to gather statistics about the installed
packages on Gentoo systems in order to provide useful information to
both users and developers.

Status: on schedule.

Things accomplished this week
=============================

- Refactored the submission parsing code.
- The server can now display basic stats for each host.
- Changed the client's behaviour when it comes to reporting USE flags.

Previously the client used gentoolkit's FlagAnalyzer to report 'plus',
'minus' and 'unset' USE flags for each installed package. However, some
manually enabled/disabled USE flags (meaning use flags defined in
package.use) could be reported as 'unset' (happens if they already exist
in the profile/make.conf). Thus, I've changed the code to now directly
query vardb for the 'IUSE', 'PKGUSE', and 'USE' flags of each package.

With this change the server now directly receives the following
information about each installed package:
  - Available USE flags (IUSE and IUSE defaults)
  - Actual package.use specification (PKGUSE)
  - Actual, final enabled USE flags (USE)

However, this has made the client slower, since it now has to access
more files. I'll probably ask this on gentoo-dev later, but if somebody
would like to share his/her opinion on whether IUSE and PKGUSE should be
reported by default, please do so here. Thank you!

Plans for next week
===================

1. Create more statistics pages on the server.
2. Start working on an API for the server.
3. Continue working on the inclusion of gentoostats in gentoolkit.
4. Make sure that the server deployment can happen before/during the
midterm evaluations.

Further information
===================

You can find the project repositories here:
  https://github.com/gg7/gentoostats
  https://github.com/gg7/gentoostats_server

If you have any questions and/or ideas about the project please don't
hesitate to get in touch with me.

Regards,
George


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Re: [gentoo-soc] Gentoostats Progress Report #4

[Hans de Graaff]

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On Tue, 2012-06-26 at 20:27 +0100, G. Gaydarov wrote:

> Plans for next week
> ===================
> 
> 3. Continue working on the inclusion of gentoostats in gentoolkit.

We can only get value from statistics if we actually have them, and that
means we need to collect good and continuously updated data from many
people. In my view this should be the only thing being worked on right
now. As a developer I'd rather have up-to-date statistics on only the
arch people are using from 10000 random gentoo machines, than much more
elaborate stats from 100 self-selected enthusiasts.

If you want to accomplish this within gsoc then you should probably have
an easily installable package out to people in 2 weeks at the most.
Otherwise time will run out and.

Kind regards,

Hans

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