More information about the Devuan popularity contest

The Devuan Popularity Contest is an effort to collect statistics about how many Devuan installations are around and how popular the available packages in the repository are.

How does popularity-contest work?

The popularity-contest package installs the script popularity-contest which is run by the cron daemon once a week, on a day selected at random when the package is installed. When run, popularity-contest collects statistics about the list of packages currently installed in your system and about the last time when files from those package were used. This information is collated in a single submission file, encrypted with the public key provided in the devuan-popcon.gpg keyring (if gnupg is installed on the host where popularity-contest is run), and sent to popcon.devuan.org, either via HTTP or via email.

Submissions are automatically processed once a day to compute the statistics reported on popcon.devuan.org.

How can I configure popularity-contest?

The configuration for your local popularity-contest installation can be found in /etc/popularity-contest.conf. Please refer to /usr/share/doc/popularity-contest/FAQ.gz and /usr/share/doc/popularity-contest/README.gz for further information.

Can submissions be traced back to the original submitter?

In theory yes, since popularity-contest sends reports using either HTTP or SMTP, and a unique id associated to the machine where popularity-contest was run is included in the submission. In practice, we don't collect or store any information about the IP or the email address associated to each submission, we always maintain the reports encrypted and only for the amount of time sufficient to generate the statistics, and we remove old reports once the data has been processed.

However, popularity-contest is disabled by default in Devuan, and will not send any information unless you have explicitly enabled it.

Who has access to the data sent to popcon.devuan.org?

Only a limited number of key developers has access to the machine where popcon.devuan.org is run. All the submission data is stored encrypted, and is used only for the time necessary to process it and generate the statistics.

How long are these data kept on popcon.devuan.org?

We delete all the reports that are more than 30 days old.