Bug#298760: [Popcon-developers] Bug#298760: popularity-contest: Gives inaccurate information when disk is mounted with noatime option

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]
> A related issue is the case where a program such as "integrit" updates
> the atime of all files in /bin and /usr (and elsewhere) each day.  

Hm, that will really make it hard to detect if a package was really
used the last week, yes. :/

> (In addition eventually dealing with this situation the program, it
> would also be nice to know if the popcon maintainers would or would
> not like to have systems affected by this problem participating in
> the program.  Is it more helpful or harmful for these systems to be
> included given their bogus "vote" counts?)

The vote is known to be very inaccurate, so the fact that a host give
inaccurate votes is not an argument from keeping it from participating
in popularity-contest.  So I welcome such hosts.  I recommend limiting
participation to "real" machines, and to not set up popularity-contest
in several chroots on a single machine.