[Popcon-developers] HTTP POST support and popcon

[Bill Allombert]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 07:57:27PM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Bill Allombert]
> > I propose to add the support for HTTP POST to the popcon package but
> > not activate it yet.
> 
> I agree.
> 
> > Reasons not to activate it is:
> > 1) We would need to update the debconf template to reflect the change at
> > that will require updating all the translations.
> 
> I do not give this issue much weight, as popcon isn't installed by
> default during installation any more. :(

Yeah, that's true.

> > 2) This will increase the bandwidth usage of popcon.
> 
> How come?  I thougth it transmitted the data compressed?

Yes, but if the plan is to send the report both by smtp and http,
this cause a 35% bandwidth increase.

> > Do you have any objection or comments ?
> 
> I suggest making a hidden debconf question making it possible to
> enable popconf using debconf preseeding.  Other than that, it sounds
> good to me.

I will let you handle that...

> What is your experience from testing this new feature so far?

I got 60 HTTP submissions and no complains. I expect to get more
tomorrow (due to the weekly crontab on sundays morning).

However I only get feedback from people with 24/24 uptime and 
network access. 

A last point: do we keep the Depends: m-t-a or we demote it to
Recommends: ? I think we should keep it to Depends for the time
being,but that will be annoying for some users. I will add it to
the FAQ.

A faster way to make things going would be to provide a second
popcon package (say popularity-contest-http) that use http 
instead of smtp. This way people just need to install whatever packages 
they prefer and we don't bother people doing woody to sarge upgrade.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.