Debian Tricks

This is about really unofficial tricks performed on Debian.
Enrico Zini has great ideas of data-mining in the Debian resources.
He gives always very good (and very funny) talks, if you get the chance try to see him once!

Example: compare your popcon with the others:

apt-get install popularity-contest

If it's the first time and you don't want to wait for the weekly cron:

HOME=/tmp su -pc "sh -c /usr/sbin/popularity-contest" nobody > /var/log/popularity-contest

Then you can upload your logfile to http://people.debian.org/~enrico/anapop and you'll get a token back, let's say 6d5d50ce49f0afa0562c43dbe69ec298, which you can use in subsequent queries:

• Get some statistics:
  http://people.debian.org/~enrico/anapop/stats/6d5d50ce49f0afa0562c43dbe69ec298
  This will show you which packets you have that makes you quite unique compared to the others
• Get some spackage suggestions:
  http://people.debian.org/~enrico/anapop/xposquery/6d5d50ce49f0afa0562c43dbe69ec298
  This proposes some packages you don't have while most people with similar popcon have installed those packages.