[Popcon-developers] popcon written in python

[Bill Allombert]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 09:45:55AM -0700, David Wahlstrom wrote:
> Thanks for the response Bill.  I appreciate the feedback.  One thing I
> forgot to mention about the pypocon that I wrote is that I also intended
> for it to be used on non-debian (dpkg) systems or debian systems not using
> apt.  It currently only supports yum/RPM in addition to deb/apt, but I'm
> thinking of adding other package managers as well like gem and pip.

Are you aware of https://github.com/xsuchy/popularity-contest ?
I am not sure if there is an equivalent of perl-base on RPM system,
but the goal should still be to have a minimal impact on the system.

> As for the performance, here is the "time" output on my system (24 cores,
> 1.2GHz, 16GB of RAM, SSD):
> 
> popularity-contest:
> real    0m16.867s
> user    0m6.024s
> sys     0m10.495s
> 
> pypopcon:
> real    0m8.297s
> user    0m6.391s
> sys     0m1.513s

As you see, the difference is only in the system time, probably
because your script is not parsing /proc/*/maps as popcon do.

> As for the atime of files changing without user interaction, this is
> something that I struggled with a bit. What it actually means to "use" a
> package is really kinda a grey area to me, so I kind of went my own
> direction with it (maybe incorrectly so).  It seems to me like files that a
> user is using even indirectly might be considered to be "popular" as the
> user could be using them to maintain their system in an automated fashion.
> I probably need to think about that some more...

I agree that "vote" is a grey area. One criteria is "would the user miss the
package if it was removed ?"

Let says you install gimp but never use it. The gimp package includes a menu
entry file that will be read regularly by the menu generating tool 
even though the program gimp is not used. gimp doc includes a scrollkeeper file
that is read regularly to create the documentation index. Still you do not use
gimp and would not miss if it was remove.

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.