[Popcon-developers] Debconf ideas

[Bill Allombert]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 08:36:21PM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
> Hello,

>  - patch ld.so.cache to add an option to preserve the atimes of the
>    libraries during indexing, and use it on the nightly cron job.  Like
>    updatedb does.

Is it really possible ? This would be very nice!


>  - when scanning a .py file, try to scan a .pyc file as well

Yes, Peter proposed to do the same.

>  - allow a package to install a /usr/share/popcon/pkgname file that
>    contains a list of files to watch in case they are found in
>    nonstandard locations.  This would give packages such as web
>    applications or openclipart a chance to participate.

I do not like that. It is much better to inprove the regexp in
popularity-contest. If we allow maintainers to increase the visibility
of their packages we will get skewed results. For example if only
half the web applications has the list, then they will look like they
are more used than the others.

Concerning web applications, I am afraid it will always be hard to
ascertain their usage, because people tend to copy them to the 
virtual server roots.

>  - I would like to process incoming votes as well.  A simple way to do
>    that is to notify me when a vote enters the archive and when a vote
>    is deleted from the archive.
>    I wrote a script that allows you to do that easily (please find it
>    attached to this mail): it implements a queue to which a user can
>    write and other users can read, without missing any item and without
>    reading items twice.  I can simply get notifications of new entries
>    and deleted entries through this queue.

Actually popcon votes are stored as mbox by the smtp server. The cronjob 
just do a mv of the mbox file, so there is no need for your script.

On the other hand, incoming votes are not anonymised and readable only 
by the popcon user. There is a major privacy concern to give access to
them.

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.