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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
