[Popcon-developers] Bug#610876: popularity-contest: Popularity contest will not be run in certain machines due to the DAY variable

[Alberto Aparici]

Package: popularity-contest
Version: 1.49
Severity: important


Popularity-contest is intended to be run approximately once a week. Its 
execution is scheduled in the cron.daily group, but restricted by the
$DAY variable, which ensures that the contest will be run only certain
day of the week. As I understand it, the DAY is set upon installation
of the package to a random number between 0 and 6, with the intention
that not all the participants submit their reports at the same time,
thus preventing heavy loads for the servers. This plan would be all right 
for a computer running 24 hours a day. Computers that are not always 
turned on are encouraged to install the anacron package, which will 
trigger the execution of popularity-contest whenever the machine is 
switched on.

But even this has a problem: some computers may not run 7 days
a week. A computer that only runs, for example, on weekends, and ends 
up with DAY="3" will never run the popularity contest, not even with
anacron, because anacron will execute the popularity-contest script
but it will exit without running the contest, as it's not Wednesday :-(

A solution should be found that doesn't involve each user messing around
with his/her configuration files. The most obvious one is scheduling 
popularity-contest in cron.weekly, but I guess that if it's not already 
in there it's because all cron.weekly tasks are run the same day at the 
same hour. Then a possible second option is to require anacron as a 
dependency and run popularity-contest from anacron with a random periodicity 
(say, between 6 and 9 days); then the server load for different users would 
be spread among different days.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=es_ES.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=es_ES.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages popularity-contest depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.36     Debian configuration management sy
ii  dpkg                          1.15.8.8   Debian package management system

Versions of packages popularity-contest recommends:
ii  cron                          3.0pl1-116 process scheduling daemon
ii  exim4                         4.72-3     metapackage to ease Exim MTA (v4) 
ii  exim4-daemon-light [mail-tran 4.72-3+b1  lightweight Exim MTA (v4) daemon

Versions of packages popularity-contest suggests:
ii  anacron                       2.3-14     cron-like program that doesn't go 

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest [Errno 2] No existe el fichero o el directorio: u'/etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest'

-- debconf information:
  popularity-contest/submiturls:
* popularity-contest/participate: true