[Popcon-developers] Re: popularity-contest rewrite

[Bill Allombert]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 03:48:47PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Bill Allombert]
> > dpkg-architecture is for the *build* architecture. It use binutils
> > to get it.  This has not a lot of sense for us since we don't intent
> > to build packages. Instead I use the architecture used to build
> > perl. That should match the binary tag.
> 
> If the result is the same text string, I see no problem changing this
> to use the perl string instead.
> > currently.

It is the same text string for all supported achitecture *today*.
However I don't see why Debian should depart from GNU standard
more than we are already (i.e. i386 for i386-linux), so maintaining it
in the long run should be painless.

> Actually, I added code to recieve and process this information.  It is
> not used yet, but the code is there.

That is the easy part :)

> > popularity-contest extract a list of files from the package and use
> > the most recent access time. When the list is empty there are no
> > information available. But the way the list is constructed is a bit
> > silly. For example it is empty for most shared libs.
> 
> So your intention is to not report the "last used" time for packages
> without files in them, and in addition, fix the handling of shared
> libraries?

You misunderstand: the list is given by

dpkg -L package | egrep '/\.*bin/|/sbin/|^/usr/games/|\.[ah]$'

If there is no match, popcon report 'no files' which is silly.
We should ask avery why he add this regex in the first place and come
with a better one (maybe '^/usr').

Anyway I don't want to make this kind of chance before the
infrastructure is fixed so as not to invalkidate results by mixing
two different algorithms.

I suppose we could also report the distribution used.

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.