POPULARITY-CONTEST(8)

📦
version 1.79ubuntu1 · 3 versions
, in ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

✨ NAME ✨

popularity-contest — the little tool that lists the most popular Debian packages, bestie 💖

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

popularity-contest

That's it. No flags, no args, no drama. Just vibes and a command 💅

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

Okay so here's the tea 🫖 — the popularity-contest command gathers information about the Debian packages installed on your system, and then it prints to stdout:

  • the name of the most recently used executable program in that package,
  • its last-accessed time (atime),
  • and its last-attribute-changed time (ctime).

That's the whole output. Lowkey simple, highkey iconic ⭐

And why do we care? Because when you aggregate the output of popularity-contest from so many other systems together, it becomes genuinely valuable 💖 It can be used to figure out which Debian packages are commonly installed, which are used, and which are installed and never used (the sad neglected ones 😭). This helps Debian maintainers make decisions — like which packages should be installed by default on new systems. Main character decision-making energy, fr fr 👑

The resulting statistic is available from the project home page: https://popcon.debian.org/ 🌈

Normally, popularity-contest is run from a cron(8) job, /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest, which automatically submits the results to Debian package maintainers — only once a week, bestie, not every five seconds 🙈 — according to the settings in /etc/popularity-contest.conf and /usr/share/popularity-contest/default.conf.

Not me running it manually and spamming the maintainers... don't do that. The cron job handles it, periodt 💅

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

Additional documentation is in /usr/share/doc/popularity-contest/ ✨

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Avery Pennarun, now maintained by the Popularity Contest Developers <debian-popcon@lists.debian.org> 🫶

Debian GNU/Linux · April 2025 · this was POPULARITY-CONTEST(8) and she ate, no cap 💖✨🎀

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