[Popcon-developers] Bug#270514: popularity-contest: Support hinting for what files are counted
Johan Walles
johan.walles at gmail.com
Mon Jul 16 17:03:30 UTC 2007
Continuing this discussion from ages ago...
Petter, I like your suggestion of adding '/usr/lib/.+/.+' (note that I
removed your ending / though) to files scanned by popularity-contest.
Now that I look at the script (popularity-contest-1.42) and look at
timestamps on my own system it seems that adding these would be
beneficial and have no bad side-effects:
/lib/.+/
^/usr/include/
Those places contain files that are older than 40 days on my system,
which should cover both boot-up accesses and monthly ones (I have a
workstation running anacron).
That would make bubblemon (and a bunch of other stuff) get proper vote
counts, without adding any false positives AFAICT. And would be
enough of a fix to close this bug (for which I am the original
reporter).
Answers to some issues in the old discussion:
One (the) reason popularity-contest doesn't scan all files is that
some files get touched even though the user doesn't "use" them. All
libs in /lib and /usr/lib for example get indexed by the dynamic
linker when the system boots. Looking at those timestamps as "votes"
would yield false positives.
Putting stuff in /etc/popularity-contest.d would only be needed for
packages that:
1. Isn't covered by the usual file scan.
2. Want to get proper vote statistics in the popularity contest.
So creating such a file wouldn't be mandatory by any means. On the
other hand it could allow package maintainers to cheat, knowingly or
not.
Regards //Johan
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