[Popcon-developers] Bug#522023: popularity-contest: popcon should be run/offered to be run once while installation

[Bill Allombert]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 09:13:42AM +0200, Erik Meusel wrote:
> Package: popularity-contest
> Version: 1.47
> Severity: normal
> 
> popularity-contest should be run/offered to be run once while installation, because tools like
> popbugs from debian-goodies package need popularity-contest to be run once.

Hello Erik,

I am afraid that would not work for two reasons:
During installation, packages that are installed just after popularity-contest
would be ignored. so the result would be inaccurate. Furthermore, all installed
packages are recently installed (RECENT-CTIME), so popcon would merely report
the list of packages used.

> Since there is the following code:
> 
> # Only run on the given day, to spread the load on the server a bit
> if [ "$DAY" ] && [ "$DAY" != "$(date +%w)" ] ; then
>   exit 0
> fi
> 
> in /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest, it cannot be run manually to solve this, as
> popbugs mentioned. When I commented out these lines and re-ran
> /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest, it worked.

Well, you do not need to run /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest to use
popbugs, because it only needs the file /var/log/popularity-contest,
so you only need to run as root:
popularity-contest > /var/log/popularity-contest

So in any case the documentation of popbugs is deficient.

If /var/log/popularity-contest is missing, popbugs should run
popularity-contest itself and somehow cache the results
(in /var/log/popularity-contest if run as root).

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.