[Popcon-developers] Fixing DEBVER report

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Bill Allombert]
> Hello Petter,
>
> popcon was recently changed to report a DEBVER value which is the
> content of /etc/debian_version.

Yes.  I expected it to contain useful information.  It didn't seem to
do that.

> Unfortunately there are several issues:
> 1) this is a conffile and some users change it so that make its value
> not very useful.

Not sure how it being a conffile is related, but its value was not
very useful, that is true.

> 2) it is a moderate privacy violation especially since this feature
> was never advertised.

Well, not sure if I see the privacy violation here.  Not very
important anyway, as the info has problem to be useless.

> So I propose to change the value of DEBVER to be the version of
> popcon installed on the machine. That should give us more
> information with a not really higher error margin.

I believe it is a bad idea to change the value.  We should drop the
DEBVER variable, and use a different name for the popcon version
installed.  Collecting the popcon version is probably more useful,
even though I do not believe it will be too useful either.

I wanted to collect info on how many are using the different versions
of debian, woody, sarge, etc.  This is obviously very hard to detect.
Adding popcon version might give some indications, so just go for it. :)