[Popcon-developers] Bug#270514: popularity-contest: Support hinting for what files are counted

[Johan Walles]

Package: popularity-contest
Version: 1.24
Severity: wishlist

To avoid false positives, popcon limits the files it scans for
last-usage-timestamps.  The heuristics for what files to look at work
for most packages, but not for all.

For example, the bubblemon package has its GNOME panel plugin binary
in "/usr/lib/bubblemon/bubblemon-gnome2".  That binary isn't scanned
by popcon.  Thus, the popcon results says that a bunch of people has
bubblemon installed, but nobody ever used it.

To work around this problem it would be nice if popcon could support
something like a /etc/popularity-contest.d directory where packages
could put information about binaries outside of the usual search paths
of popcon.  For example, the bubblemon package could contain a
/etc/popularity-contest.d/bubblemon file containing one line containing
the name of the file to scan.

When run, popcon would scan files listed in /etc/popularity-contest.d
in addition to the files it scans currently.

  Regards //Johan

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.26-1-686
Locale: LANG=sv_SE, LC_CTYPE=sv_SE

Versions of packages popularity-contest depends on:
ii  debconf                       1.4.30.2   Debian configuration management sy
ii  dpkg                          1.10.23    Package maintenance system for Deb
ii  exim [mail-transport-agent]   3.36-11    An MTA (Mail Transport Agent)

-- debconf information:
* popularity-contest/participate: true
* popularity-contest/intro:
  popularity-contest/hostid-failed: