On Mon, Aug 03, 2026 at 12:09:58AM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote: > On Sun, 26 Jul 2026 at 21:14, Bill Allombert > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > i just want to know what it's going to send, without actually sending any > > > mails to anyone. > > > > In /etc/popularity-contest.conf set > > MAILTO="" > > USEHTTP="no" > > There should still be a logfile at /var/log/popularity-contest > > So this didnt quite work, but was enough of a hint:
> I think the intention with the cron approach was: > a) at install time, $DAY is chosen randomly as a day of the week (date(1)'s > %w) > b) always submit on $DAY > c) also submit if we ever notice it's been a week without a submission Thanks for you effort! There is an extra difficulty: At install time, a file /etc/cron.d/popularity-contest is created with a random time of day so that different systems reports at different time. Unfortunately, we do not know whether the system will be up at that time, so we also run the script via the normal /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest mechanism. But likely you take this into account already > I've implemented a MODE=--systemd that does the same using a systend > timer, at > https://salsa.debian.org/rpil2/popularity-contest/-/tree/systemd-timer?ref_type=heads We need to deal with the case where the user do not accept the changes to /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest at upgrade time ("keep old version" in dpkg). Also we should avoid systemd security setting that are incompatible with other SMTP servers and also with tor. Cheers, Bill.
