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Popularity-contest Frequently Asked Questions.
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Q) What informations are reported by popularity-contest ?
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A) popularity-contest report the Debian architecture you use, the version of
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popularity-contest you use and the list of packages installed on the system
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with the most recent atime of important files in them (mainly executable
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files).
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Q) What are the privacy consideration for popularity-contest ?
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A) Each popularity-contest host is identified by a random 128bit uuid
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(MY_HOSTID in /etc/popularity-contest). This uuid is used to track
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submission issued by the same host. It should be kept secret. The reports
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are sent by email to the popcon server. The server automatically extract
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the report from the email and store it in a database for a maximum of 20
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days or until the host send a new report. This database is readable only by
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Debian Developers. The emails are readable only by the server admins.
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Every day, the server compute a summary and post it on
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<http://popcon.debian.org/all-popcon-results.txt.gz>. This summary is a
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merge of all the submissions and does not include uuids.
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Known weakness of the system:
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1) Your email submission might be intercepted. We evaluate the possibility
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to use public-key cryptography to protect the email.
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2) Someone who know you are very likely to use a particular package reported
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by only one person (e.g. you are the maintainer) might infer you are not at
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home when the package is not reported anymore. However this is only a
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problem if you are gone for more than two weeks if the computer is shut-down
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and 23 days if it is let idle.
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3) Unofficial and local packages are reported. This can be an issue
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especially with 2) above, especially for custom-build kernel packages.
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We are evaluating how far we can alleviate this problem.
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Q) My submissions bounce with
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550 [PERMFAIL] popcon.debian.org requires valid sender domain.
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A) popularity-contest send the report as root but the email address of the root
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user was not configured properly. With exim, you can add an entry for root
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in /etc/email-addresses with a suitable address.
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A better fix would be to change popcon.debian.org to not reject emails with
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invalid sender domain in the first place, but it is out of our reach for the
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time being.
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Q) /usr is mounted with 'noatime'.
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A) popularity-contest relies on atime to know what packages were used during
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the last month. This means you will only report the list of packages
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installed without usage information.
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