[Popcon-developers] Re: How does "popularity-contest" work?

[Bill Allombert]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2004 at 11:36:50AM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> 
> [Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim]
> > Unfortunately, it does not explain much about how to send the
> > contest manually. There are many Debian systems behind our firewall
> > with no outbound email system.
> 
> I don't know anything about sending the contest info manually.  CC to
> the popcon-developers mailing list, in case someone there have
> something to add.
> 
> I suspect all system types are affected equally with blocked email,
> and am not sure if this problem affect the statistical validity of the
> results.
> 
> 
> > Technical question:
> >
> > 1. IS IT OK to send manually the result of popularity contest?
> 
> As long as the result look like the emails send by the automatic
> system, and the content is the same as the one generated by the popcon
> scripts, I see no problem with this.

You can send manually the result of popularity contest, but beware that
the popcon server does not handle MIME, so the popcon output must be
sent as the email body.

> > 2. IS IT OK to send the result concatenated in one large file?
> 
> I do not understand this one.

Yes, you can concatenate several popcon report in a single body.
Remember that all the popcon report must carry a different HOSTID, else
only the latest will be considered.

> > 3. How often do you expect me to sent the contest?  Once a week like
> >    the cron? Once a month? Is once a year OK?
> 
> The submissions need to arrive once a week.

In practice they need to arrive every 20 days, but they should arrive
once a week to keep a reasonnable accuracy.

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.