DEBIAN PACKAGE POPULARITY CONTEST - Avery Pennarun ================================= This package contains a script, /usr/sbin/popularity-contest, which generates a list of the packages installed on your system, in order of most-recently-used to least-recently-used. The simplest way to use this information is to help clean up your hard drive by removing unused packages. For example, popularity-contest | grep '' will show you a list of packages you haven't used in a while. Note that this output isn't totally accurate: some packages appear "old" but you can't remove them because other (non-old) packages depend on them. Shared library packages are particularly bad this way because it's impossible to tell when a library was last used. The popularity-contest output looks like this: POPULARITY-CONTEST-0 TIME:914183330 ID:b92a5fc1809d8a95a12eb3a3c84166dd 914183333 909868335 grep /bin/fgrep 914183333 909868280 findutils /usr/bin/find 914183330 909885698 dpkg-awk /usr/bin/dpkg-awk 914183330 909868577 gawk /usr/bin/gawk [...more lines...] END-POPULARITY-CONTEST-0 TIME:914183335 The first and last lines allow you to put more than one set of popularity-contest results into a single file and then split them up easily later. The rest of the lines are package entries, one line for each package installed on your system. They have the format: is the name of the Debian package that contains . is the most recently used program, static library, or header (.h) file in the package. and are the access time and creation time of the on your disk, respectively, represented as the number of seconds since midnight GMT on January 1, 1970 (i.e. in Unix time_t format). Linux updates whenever you open the file; was set when you first installed the package. is determined by popularity-contest depending on , , and the current date. can be RECENT-CTIME, OLD, or NOFILES. RECENT-CTIME means that atime is very close to ctime; it's impossible to tell whether the package was used recently or not, since is also updated when is set. Normally, this happens because you have recently upgraded the package to a new version, resetting the . OLD means that the is more than a month ago; you haven't used the package for more than a month. NOFILES means that no files in the package seemed to be programs, so , , and are invalid. PARTICIPATING IN THE PUBLIC SURVEY ================================== You can help out the Debian Project by sending your popularity-contest results to us anonymously. With information from enough people, we can determine which packages are most often used, which are often installed but not used, and which are nearly never used. That way, we can help people make decisions about which packages should fit on the first Debian install CD, for example, or which packages are most important for an FTP mirror site to keep. !!!! SECURITY NOTE: it's impossible to make a submission completely anonymous, since Internet servers tend to add headers and log messages along the way. Our receiver program at debian throws away this information as soon as possible so no one will see it, but if you're really paranoid you might not want to participate. !!!! The popularity-contest package comes with a cron task to send the information out to us each week. You can change where the submissions go by editing /etc/popularity-contest.conf. Normally, you will send the results to: survey@popcon.debian.org The result of the survey is available at https://popcon.debian.org/ You can find some sample analysis scripts in /usr/share/doc/popularity-contest as part of this package. RELATED PROJECTS ================ There are several projects trying to count users and machines. First and foremost is the Linux Counter at https://www.linuxcounter.net/. It tries to estimate the amount of Linux users worldwide. There are some popcon installations for other distributions: Ubuntu: http://popcon.ubuntu.com/ DebianEdu: http://popcon.skolelinux.org/ NeuroDebian: http://neuro.debian.net/popcon/ INSTALLATION PRESEEDING ======================= The package supports preseeding during installation to change the URL used to submit reports. The template name is 'popularity-contest/submiturls', and it expects one or more space separated URLs to use when submitting. QUESTIONS ? =========== Please look at the FAQ in /usr/share/doc/popularity-contest/FAQ or for an up-to-date version, online at https://popcon.debian.org/FAQ FINDING THE SOURCE ================== This package is being maintained in GIT on salsa.debian.org. The project summary page is available from The project home page is at . REPORTING BUGS ============== Report bugs into the Debian Bug Tracking System. See for instructions. If you want to get in touch with the popularity contest maintainers, send an email to debian-popcon@lists.debian.org.