[6706] in Release_7.7_team
Re: thirdparty packages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Fri May 7 13:43:37 2010
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
Cc: alexp@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1005071144390.20247@infinite-loop.mit.edu>
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Date: Fri, 07 May 2010 13:43:26 -0400
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On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 12:42 -0400, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> (NOTE: This is background data for today's discussion about -thirdparty.
> This e-mail only covers what I propose eliminating based on the data.
> How/when we do the elimination, how we publicize it, potential pitfalls,
> etc, will all be discussed at the meeting)
>
> I have analyzed the user of thirdparty packages based on 2 weeks' worth of
> metrics data.
> 145 ship some sort of binary
> Of those 145, 33 were used at least once in the past 2 weeks. Now, 2
> weeks is not a great sample size. Ideally, we'd have a semester's worth
> of data. And we should totally revisit this in, say December.
Well, yeah. I think this is pretty short as I mentioned when we talked
about it.
> Here are the 99 packages that were not used, and the metapackages they're
> in. There are clearly some things in here we should keep, like octave and
> blast2, since I've seen questions about them from users recently. There
> are other things that are less clearly useful, like clisp.
>
> So, some food for though between now and 3pm.
So clearly there's not enough time for detailed review but some general
thoughts below. I'd feel a lot better if we had at least a full semester
before we make significant deletions. Also, what machines are being
monitored? I presume cluster only. Is is all of those?
There's a number of things that I know get used, some quite a bit that
for some reason may have not been used in the last 2 weeks (although
gfortran in particular surprises me; I know people on Athena use FORTRAN
quite a bit! I know Course 6 uses the geda stuff and verilog, though
perhaps not in the last 2 weeks. cmake was specifically requested by
course faculty. latex2html, html2ps and some others are utilities I'm
sure people use. I'd suggest keeping all the lib* stuff, as most of it
is used in conjunction with various common scientific applications. the
mono* stuff is all part of a bit bundle that I know gets use- I got a
question about it about a week or 2 ago. I think we should keep all of
it if we keep it at all, otherwise it will confuse users if part of it
is there and part isn't. Pro-Engineer won't run without nfs-common. pari
was installed by faculty request. My wrapper logs show pymol was used
197 times in 2009, ranking about 30th in the list of apps I have wrapped
and collect my own stats on.. xcircuit has been request multiple times
over the years, and gets non-negligible use in my stats... python-numpy
was requested by course staff... vtk-tcl, qhull-bin and gsl-bin are one
component of larger suites that are mostly libraries; we should keep
these if we keep the rest. We should keep xmaxima; maxima gets used.
scratchbox2 was faculty requested.
Anyhow, this should give you an idea; this is not comprehensive, just
what immediately came to mind. For various reasons like the above, I
think we should keep a bunch of this stuff, particularly until we have
more usage stats. I should list which of these I think are OK to delete
now, and I'd guesstimate that I'd be OK with dropping maybe 60% or so
now.
Alex
> biosquid debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> blast2 debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> boo debathena-thirdparty-programming
> clisp debathena-thirdparty-languages
> clisp-dev debathena-thirdparty-languages
> cmake debathena-thirdparty-languages
> djvulibre-bin debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> dx debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> f2c debathena-thirdparty-languages
> fluid debathena-thirdparty-programming
> ftnchek debathena-thirdparty-languages
> gcj debathena-thirdparty-languages
> geda-gattrib debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> geda-gsymcheck debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> geda-utils debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> geda-xgsch2pcb debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> gerbv debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> gfortran debathena-thirdparty-languages
> ginac-tools debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> gitk debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> glpk-utils debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> gnucap debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> gnucash debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> gnudatalanguage debathena-thirdparty-languages
> gsl-bin debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> gspiceui debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> gtkwave debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> guile-1.8-dev debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> hfsutils-tcltk debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> html2ps debathena-thirdparty-text
> ikvm debathena-thirdparty-programming
> irb debathena-thirdparty-languages
> ironpython debathena-thirdparty-programming
> jedit debathena-thirdparty-text
> jython debathena-thirdparty-languages
> latex2html debathena-thirdparty-text
> libboost1.37-dev debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> libcv-dev debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> libfftw3-dev debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> libfltk1.1-dev debathena-thirdparty-programming
> libgsl0-dev debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> libitpp-dev debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> libnspr4-dev debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> libnss3-dev debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> libqt-perl debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> liferea debathena-thirdparty-information
> lp-solve debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> mercurial debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> mono-gmcs debathena-thirdparty-programming
> mono-mcs debathena-thirdparty-programming
> mono-utils debathena-thirdparty-programming
> mono-vbnc debathena-thirdparty-programming
> monodoc-browser debathena-thirdparty-programming
> motif-clients debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> mpg123 debathena-thirdparty-audio
> nfs-common debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> nickle debathena-thirdparty-numerical
> nvi debathena-thirdparty-text
> ocaml debathena-thirdparty-languages
> ocaml-mode debathena-thirdparty-languages
> octave3.0-emacsen debathena-thirdparty-numerical
> octave3.0-headers debathena-thirdparty-numerical
> pari-doc debathena-thirdparty-numerical
> pari-gp2c debathena-thirdparty-numerical
> pdftoipe debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> pymol debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> python-numpy debathena-thirdparty-languages
> python-vtk debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> qhull-bin debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> qt4-dev-tools debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> qt4-qtconfig debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> rcs debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> recode debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> rxvt debathena-thirdparty-accessories
> scala debathena-thirdparty-languages
> scratchbox2 debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> sdr debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> singular debathena-thirdparty-numerical
> sox debathena-thirdparty-sound
> tcl-dev debathena-thirdparty-programming
> tetgen debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> tgif debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> tofrodos debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> units debathena-thirdparty-utilities
> valgrind debathena-thirdparty-languages
> verilog debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> vlc debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> vtk-tcl debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> weblint-perl debathena-thirdparty-information
> wise debathena-thirdparty-simulation
> wordnet debathena-thirdparty-information
> wv debathena-thirdparty-text
> wx-common debathena-thirdparty-libraries
> xcal debathena-thirdparty-accessories
> xcircuit debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> xfig-doc debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> xmaxima debathena-thirdparty-numerical
> xprint-utils debathena-thirdparty-graphics
> xtightvncviewer debathena-thirdparty-accessories
> ytnef debathena-thirdparty-communication
>
>
