[Popcon-developers] Bug#270514: popularity-contest: Support hinting for what files are counted

[Johan Walles]

Continuing this discussion from ages ago...

Petter, I like your suggestion of adding '/usr/lib/.+/.+' (note that I
removed your ending / though) to files scanned by popularity-contest.

Now that I look at the script (popularity-contest-1.42) and look at
timestamps on my own system it seems that adding these would be
beneficial and have no bad side-effects:
/lib/.+/
^/usr/include/

Those places contain files that are older than 40 days on my system,
which should cover both boot-up accesses and monthly ones (I have a
workstation running anacron).

That would make bubblemon (and a bunch of other stuff) get proper vote
counts, without adding any false positives AFAICT.  And would be
enough of a fix to close this bug (for which I am the original
reporter).

Answers to some issues in the old discussion:

One (the) reason popularity-contest doesn't scan all files is that
some files get touched even though the user doesn't "use" them.  All
libs in /lib and /usr/lib for example get indexed by the dynamic
linker when the system boots.  Looking at those timestamps as "votes"
would yield false positives.

Putting stuff in /etc/popularity-contest.d would only be needed for
packages that:
1. Isn't covered by the usual file scan.
2. Want to get proper vote statistics in the popularity contest.

So creating such a file wouldn't be mandatory by any means.  On the
other hand it could allow package maintainers to cheat, knowingly or
not.

  Regards //Johan