[Popcon-developers] Bug#496831: popularity-contest: Does not send votes for non-program packages

[Bill Allombert]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:35:30PM +0200, Noel David Torres Taño wrote:
> Package: popularity-contest
> Version: 1.45
> Severity: important
> 
> 
> Actually popcon is unable to send votes for packages like
> kdemultimedia or libxcursor1 because they have no executables.

Hello Noel,

You are misunderstanding how popcon vote works.

1) popcon does not really send votes for individual packages. Votes are
computed on the server from the report. The FAQ says:

  Q) What is considered a 'vote' for a package ?
  
  A) A computer 'vote' for a package if according to the data provided in the
     report, a program provided or depending on the package was used less than
     thirty days ago. This computation is performed by the popcon server.  

2) Executables files are not treated specially.

3) libxcursor1 has actually 27015 votes:
$ wget -O- -q http://popcon.debian.org/by_vote | grep libxcursor1
192   libxcursor1                    55969 27015  9400  8189 11365 (Debian X Strike Force)

4) kdemultimedia does not have any real content so it does not
deserve any votes, since it can be removed without ill effect.
Here the file list of kdemultimedia:

 /usr/share/doc/kdemultimedia/changelog.Debian.gz
 /usr/share/doc/kdemultimedia/copyright

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.