[Popcon-developers] popcon 1.7 to be released

[Bill Allombert]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 11:14:46PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> As long as the period is short, I'll ignore the potential confusion.
> You remembered to tag the release.  That is good.

Don't worry I maintain menu. This another alioth hosted debian native
package with CVS.

> But the new version do not work in Woody as dpkg-query is missing. But

Note that I have added an explicit dependency on dpkg (>=1.10) 

> I want to test it on my machine, and also want it to be easy to
> "backport" it.  Is it possible to get it working without using
> dpkg-query?

Yes, using dpkg-awk back, but I really disklike this solution since
this lead to lot of time stamps modified by pocon itself before running.
Also dpkg-query is the dpkg official way to do that. 

I can write a specific version for woody, but I don't want to polute the
sid package for that purpose.

I don't see any need to backport to woody. I mean, there is no chance
woody users will massively install the backport and one or two
reports more make no difference.

> For the next version, I suspect we should include the package version
> in the report.  Do you agree?  This would make it possible to handle
> changes in the report format without having to guess which version of
> the format that is used?

Format version is already available. Note the -0 in
POPULARITY-CONTEST-0

We just need to bump it when we change the format. Adding the package
version is more difficult to handle that interface version (you
have to keep a list of version <= >=).

Also the best is a auto-extensive interface that does not require any
inrterface version. RFC 822 format come to mind:

We just add a list of Field: value pair after the POPULARITY-CONTEST-0
line:

POPULARITY-CONTEST-0 TIME:1066648958 ID:0050b7c0cfe71892e11c693960a4bd2b
Arch: i386
Suit: 3.0
1066648999 1066296372 bash /bin/sh
1066648988 1058431056 findutils /usr/bin/find

This is straight-forward to handle/extand. 
If a field is missing, then it is not supported by whatever version of
popcon generated the report.

If you agree, I change popcon to do that
Suit is `cat /etc/debian_version` unless you have a better idea.

Cheers,
Bill.