Re: State of the GNUnion 2020

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Andy,

On Mon, 2020-02-10 at 20:14 +0100, Andy Wingo wrote:
> Recently I put dozens of hours into
> analyzing past GNU releases.  The result is here:
> 
>   https://wingolog.org/archives/2020/02/09/state-of-the-gnunion-2020

Thanks for that and for publishing the raw data too. The data itself is
fascinating. I must say I don't really know how to interpret the data.
Also because as you say active package count isn't precisely the same
as project health. Having more data, like lines of code and/or
contributor counts would be nice. But even harder to collect.

Two random observations for packages that I happened to look at:

- In the manually-collected-release-dates you include eprints,
  but it isn't really clear that is still
  a GNU package. https://www.gnu.org/software/eprints/ just
  redirects to https://www.eprints.org/uk/
  I cannot even find the word GNU on their website.
  The sources mention GNU EPrints 4 times, but almost everywhere
  the software is just called EPrints. Other uses of GNU are only
  in combination with the (L)GPL.
- GNU diction did do some releases through ftp.gnu.org, but
  does also have some more releases at
  http://www.moria.de/~michael/diction/
  But it isn't really clear how you would know that.
  Gentoo has the newer versions, but no other distro seems to
  have picked them up. Since they aren't published on ftp.gnu.org.

No real conclusion from those observations. Except that getting
reliable data about GNU packages is much harder than it looks.

Thanks for collecting it all. And I hope people will look at it and
sent in updates where possible.

Cheers,

Mark