[Popcon-developers] Bug#574743: popularity-contest: all-popcon-results.txt.gz contains bogus data

[Stuart Prescott]

Package: popularity-contest
Version: 1.46
Severity: normal

The popcon summary data at http://popcon.debian.org/all-popcon-results.txt.gz
contains bogus data on lines 85993 to 85995 (at present):

Package: py<F4>hon-central                     0     0     0     1
Package: /usr/lib/mime/packages/mime-suprort     0     0     0     1
Package: grof<E6>-base                         0     1     0     0

This is presumably all dodgy data from just one submitter... perhaps the popcon
aggregation scripts should filter such data that has package names that are
clearly incorrect like these? (i.e. the package names are non-conformant with
policy §5.6.7/§5.6.1)

I presume that there is a simple checksum included in the data as it
submitted by popcon so that issues with corruption in transit aren't an issue
and that the data in question here indicates some poor user with a very badly
broken status file.

Dodgy data like this is an issue for consumers of the popcon results such as
the UDD (which obviously needs to be made more robust to such bad input).

cheers
Stuart