[Popcon-developers] Why isn't all files in a package checked?

Petter Reinholdtsen pere@hungry.com
Wed, 06 Jul 2005 21:40:51 +0200


In popcon, there is code to loop over all installed packages, then
loop over all files in the package, and finally check the access time
of all files with names matching this regex:

  m{/bin/|/sbin/|^/usr/games/|\.[ah]$|\.pm$}

But I fail to find any rationale in the package why only those files
are checked.  Anyone know more?  I saw in bug #270514 an hypothesis
that it was to avoid false positives, and I personally have a
hypothesis that it is to speed up the processing time by not doing
stat() on all files in the system.

But I do not know, and to solve bugs #229237 and #270514 I believe it
is vital to understand why the current code look like it does, to make
sure the fixes do not add back some old bug.

Anyone got clues to spare?  Avery?