Bug#632438: popularity-contest: a way to exclude certain packages

[Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org>]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 11:21:17AM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Bill Allombert]
> > Dear Kentaro,
> > Could you explain why you want to exclude some package ?
> > I am concerned this will squew the statistic, if used
> > indiscriminately.
> 
> The use case was explained by Paul Wise in the opening of this issue.

Indeed, and I suggested the control field solution already, but so far nobody
answered they were interested in this feaure so I did not implement it.

> > Instead I would suggest to add a new dpkg control field 'X-Popcon:
> > private' and have popularity-contest skip packages having this field.
> >
> > This way users will be able to create private packages that will never
> > register even on misconfigured hosts.
> 
> This sound like a good solution to the use case from Paul, about
> personal metapackages with hostname in their name.

Thanks, this is encouraging!

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.