On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 09:13:42AM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: > [Russ Allbery] > > It's not *impossible*... someone could be running the scripts from the > > package without having the package installed. I don't know why they'd do > > that, though, or whether that's a more plausible explanation than a > > corrupt database. > > Sure, it is possible for people to run the script manually without the > package, but I believe it is unlikely.
I believe .25% of systems having a corrupt dpkg database is also rather unlikely; it would mean we're getting a far lower amount of bugreports than we deserve. > The ratio of hosts submitting to popcon without having popcon > installed has been fairly stable, and I kind of doubt that such > activity is done regularly by several people. Indeed. This would also rule out a temporary bug in popcon (in that case, it would have been a peak which would subside over time). Instead, my guess is that there are corner-case situations in which popcon tries to read the dpkg database at a time when it is in a state of flux; and that because of that, popcon doesn't get all the existing data, only part of it. Of the top of my head, I can think of two possible examples where this might be the case: - If popcon tries to read the dpkg database while it's being installed or immediately after (no clue whether it does), that could be the problem. This would suggest that the ratio of the number of people newly installing popcon versus the number of people having popcon installed already is stable over time; this in turn would suggest an increasing rate of growth. - Another possibility might be a group of people having popcon and something like cron-apt installed at the same time; if both cronjobs trigger at approximately the same time, that would greatly increase the chance that popcon is indeed trying to read the dpkg database at the time when cron-apt is rewriting it. I think the latter of the above two is the more likely. Of course, all of the above is guesswork... -- <Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes. -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
