[Popcon-developers] Bug#610876: popularity-contest: Popularity contest will not be run in certain machines due to the DAY variable

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 09:27:22AM -0800, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 07, 2011 at 12:33:16PM +0100, Bill Allombert wrote:
> > Is your patch valid with /bin/sh being dash ?
> 
> i don't see anything that would be a problem...  i haven't actually tested the
> code, but i've used all the constructs in dash scripts in the past without
> problem. is there something specific that you're wondering about?

i've now tested the following patch with both bash and dash, and it appears to
work fine.


> > This is an interesting suggestion. Maybe we would change the script to:
> > 1) always try to report on DAY.
> > 2) always try to report if /var/log/popularity-contest is more that 7 days old.
> > 
> > Using the first time cron.daily runs as the reporting day unsufficiently
> > random, especially with clusters.


ok, i've actually tested this patch a bit (my original -le was right, gah):

--- cron.daily.orig	2011-03-06 08:26:52.000000000 -0800
+++ /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest	2011-03-14 11:11:43.000000000 -0700
@@ -26,16 +26,30 @@
   export http_proxy="$HTTP_PROXY";
 fi
 
+POPCON=/var/log/popularity-contest
+
 # Only run on the given day, to spread the load on the server a bit
 if [ "$DAY" ] && [ "$DAY" != "$(date +%w)" ] ; then
-  exit 0
+	# Ensure that popcon runs at least once in the last week
+	if [ -f "$POPCON" ] ; then
+		now=$(date +%s)
+		lastrun=$(date -r $POPCON +%s)
+		# one week (minus 5 hours), in seconds
+		# $((60*60*24*7-60*60*5))
+		week=586800
+		if [ "$(( $now - $lastrun ))" -le "$week" ]; then
+			exit 0
+		fi
+	else
+		touch $POPCON
+		exit 0
+	fi
 fi
 
 # keep old logs
 cd /var/log
 umask 022
 savelog -c 7 popularity-contest >/dev/null
-POPCON=/var/log/popularity-contest
 
 run_popcon()
 {

> both patches might need some fiddling with the value of week in seconds, since
> simply running popcon might take longer than a second; you might end up
> consistantly running every 8 days (for machines that don't typically run on
> $DAY).  subtracting a few hours (5-12?) from the week variable might be the
> simplest way to handle that.

i just picked 5 hours. easy enough to adjust, but i think that should align
most cases on the weekly schedule.

i also went with the patch that creates an empty /var/log/popularity-contest on
the first run, which may result in missing the first week's results if it
doesn't happen to run on $DAY. no big loss, in the grand scheme of things.

wasn't sure weather to use tabs or spaces, it seemed like most of the code was
using tabs, but not consistantly.


live well,
  vagrant