[Popcon-developers] Bug#571926: popularity-contest: popcon doesn't track usage of python modules in a consistent manner

[Bill Allombert]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 12:14:38PM +0000, Stuart Prescott wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > > Perhaps add |\.py$ to that regexp?
> >
> > We cannot do that because the .py files are read by the python compiler at
> > package installation time to generate the .pyc file, and never after, so
> > the atime of the .py file is useless (it is always equal to the
> > installation time).
> >
> > See also bug #265360.
> 
> duh... of course.
> 
> Can we come up with some way of making popcon more useful for python module 
> packages then? (Other than just number of installations) The discussion of 
> how widely used a package is (i.e. is it low popcon and a candidate for 
> removal because it looks orphaned etc) is harder to have if you don't know if 
> the X installation reports are actually using module or if it just happened 
> to be installed once back on the box when it was running potato and left to 
> rot there... 

Ah potato!

> As a (probably poorly-conceived) idea, would it be too much hard work for the 
> popcon scripts to special-case \.py$ to actually take the atime of the 
> corresponding \.pyc$ file? Popcon would need to know where 
> pysupport/pycentral is sticking these files of course.

I think at this point if someone would commit themself to write a
reasonnably-sized patch to deal with python *and* maintain it, we would accept
it. But I agree with Petter that if popcon tried to handle every special case,
then the popcon script would be too large and too complex.

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.