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h2. Frequently Asked Questions

h3(#anonymity). What about privacy? Is my data safe?

Yes! Popcorn does not store any information about the submitting system except for the data described "below":/faq#what-track. No IPs are stored.

We don't store the history of a system's submissions. In order to ensure that no system sends duplicate submissions, we store a hashed system id together with the date that the system last submitted data to us. Submissions are all independent. 

h3(#what-track). What does popcorn track?

Popcorn tracks the current distribution name and version, the user's architecture and various metadata about each of the packages in the system's RPM database. For each package we track: status (see "what does a package's status mean?":/faq#package-status below for more), name, version, release, epoch, architecture and vendor. The vendor is usually a repository name, URL or other identifier set by the original packager.

h3(#package-status). What does a package's status mean?

A package's status is determined by looking at all the files in that package's filesystem atime or time of last access. A package's last access time is then set to the access time of the most recently accessed time in that package.

Some files are not tracked, such as tmp files for example. Only the files in the following directories are watched: /bin, /boot, /lib, /lib64, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/games, /usr/include, /usr/lib, /usr/lib64, /usr/libexec, /usr/sbin.

After a package's atime is determined, packages are put into the following four categories:

* (v) voted - package is older than 30 days and has been used in the last 30 days (these are the packages we care most about)
* (r) recent - package has been recently installed (less than 30 days)
* (o) old - package is older than 30 days and has not been used recently
* (n) nofiles - there are no watched files present in this package

Each package falls into exactly one category, so (n + r + v + o) is the total number of the installed packages.

h3(#the-name). Why is it called popcorn?

Popcorn is a <strong>pop</strong>ularity <strong>con</strong>test for <strong>R</strong>PMs. It was inspired and was born as a clone of Debian's popularity contest: "popcon.debian.org":http://popcon.debian.org, but it grew beyond that. Popcorn provides a REST API to make the data easy to process and available to all live.

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