alien use patterns

Something interesting has changed in the past couple of years. I used to get my majority of alien bug reports and questions from Debian users. But nowadays, most of them are from users of rpm based distributions who are converting a deb into a rpm. Quite a few seem to be from developers who have a deb and want to make a quickie rpm to distribute.

This is an interesting shift. A few possible reasons for it might include:

• More developers using Debian.
• Increase in the percentage of users of RPM based distributions.
• Increasing clue amoung Debian users leads to less use of alien in places where it can be avoided; slight clue deficit amoung RPM users leads to the inverse.
• I generally do a worse job supporting alien on RPM based distributions (still doesn't support some newer versions of RPM that are not in Debian). So I hear more from the users of the less supported systems.

(In other news, use of alien to convert stampede packages is way down..)