[Popcon-developers] Only suggest MTA from popcon? (Was: Bug#589213: Do not install Exim in minimal system)

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

Limiting the discussion to popcon-developers.

[Bill Allombert]
> Recommends is the correct relationship. Without a MTA, there is no
> garranty that report are sent even on correctly configured hosts.

With a MTA, there is no such guarantee either.  If the MTA isn't
installed and configured already as popularity-contest is installed, I
believe it is unlikely that the pulled in MTA will be configured
correctly and able to send email after popularity-contest is
installed.  The HTTP delivery only need a working Internet connection,
while the SMTP delivery require correct configuration and a ISP that
allow emails to be sent from the machine.  The former is more common
than the latter these days. :(

This make me believe a suggest is a more sensible relationship from
populartity-contest to a MTA.

My gut feeling is that most reports arrive via HTTP, but I am not
quite sure how to measure it.  I was able to count the number of
submissions received using HTTP the last week like this:

pere at bellini:/org/popcon.debian.org$ for f in  /var/log/apache2/popcon.debian.org-access.log-2010071[1-9].gz; do count=$(zcat $f |grep -c popcon-upload); echo $(basename $f) $count $(( 100 * $count / 89401 )) ; done
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100711.gz 15156 16
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100712.gz 12281 13
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100713.gz 10260 11
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100714.gz 10155 11
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100715.gz  9971 11
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100716.gz 10023 11
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100717.gz  9838 11
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100718.gz 14996 16
popcon.debian.org-access.log-20100719.gz 12377 13
pere at bellini:/org/popcon.debian.org$

The last number is the fraction of todays total submission count
(89401) that was received the given day.  I do not know how to count
the amount arriving via email, but given the amount arriving via HTTP,
it would have to be a minority.

Anyway, if I am the only one believing the recommends should be
changed to suggests, I am not going to spent more time trying to
convince you that this is the most sensible setting. :)

Happy hacking,
-- 
Peter Reinholdtsen