[Popcon-developers] Bug#865730: popularity-contest: Checking /proc/*/maps seems to be ineffective

[robert@debian.org (Robert Luberda)]

Package: popularity-contest
Version: 1.65
Severity: normal

popularity-contest has some code to scan /proc/*/maps files to check
for currently used programs. However popularity-contest itself is
usually run from the cron job as the nobody user, who does not have
permission to read those /proc/*/maps files...

I think that either the support for reading the maps files should be
dropped or popularity-contest should be run as root (BTW. it would make
sense to run popcon-upload as nobody instead of root), however the
second option would change the contents of the reports, because 
currently for some reason  the multi-arch libs are ignored via the 
"! m{/lib/.+-.+-.+/}" (which BTW. does not work on hurd-i386),
except for files coming from /proc/*/maps. This causes most library
packages to be reported as `no-files' except for libperl5.24 used
by the popularity-contest process itself, e.g. my recent log file
contains:

  1497960000 1496534400 libperl5.24 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.24.1/auto/File/Glob/Glob.so

Running popularity-contest as root would cause more *.so files to be
reported because of the /proc/*/maps, for example libcap2 would be
sent as:
  1498262400 1490616000 libcap2 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcap.so.2.25
instead of :
  0 0 libcap2 <NOFILES>
(Most probably similar result would be possible to gain even when
running as nobody if the exclusion of files matching to multi-lib pattern 
is removed).

Regards,
robert

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (990, 'testing'), (990, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=pl_PL.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=pl_PL.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=pl_PL.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages popularity-contest depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.61
ii  dpkg                   1.18.24

Versions of packages popularity-contest recommends:
ii  cron [cron-daemon]              3.0pl1-128+b1
ii  gnupg                           2.1.18-8
ii  postfix [mail-transport-agent]  3.2.2-1

Versions of packages popularity-contest suggests:
ii  anacron  2.3-24

-- debconf information excluded