Cricket has the ability to collect statistics of the collector runs.
To turn this on, you need to change '$subtreetimes = 1' in collect-subtrees
and insert the 'subtree-times' subtree from the examples directory into
your config tree.

There are a few things in the Debian version that make this more trouble
than it IMO should:

- /usr/share/cricket/util/get-collector-stats doesn't require
  /etc/cricket/cricket-conf.pl and uses hard-coded logdir instead of the
  one in the configuration file

- it would be nice to have a debconf option to make the '$subtreetimes = 1'
  modification or move it to the general configuration file, so the
  modification wouldn't get lost in an upgrade

- the current way to run the collector ('collect-subtrees ALL') doesn't
  create timestamps for the individual subtrees (this is minor, if an upgrade
  doesn't overwrite /etc/cron.d/cricket)

There is nothing Debian-specific about this; I ship get-collector-stats
unmodified except for the first line (path to perl).  You are correct that
it should use cricket-conf.pl, though, and I will pass on this suggestion.

Yes, this really belongs in cricket-conf.pl, and I will pass this on as
well.

As I understand it (I don't use this feature personally), the statistics are
collected on the basis of subtree sets, not individual subtrees, so this is
just a consequence of the fact that only one subtree set (ALL) is collected
by default.  If different subtree sets are to be collected, the user will
modify cron.d/cricket and subtree-sets to reflect that, and everything
should work as expected with regard to collecting subtree time statistics.
Is there something else that you were concerned about?

Sorry, I was unclear - the Debian-specific problem was just that
get-collector-stats doesn't look for cricket-conf.pl in /etc/cricket (it
does use cricket-conf.pl in the upstream version already).

Also, I was under the impression that $Common::global::gLogDir was a
Debian-specific addition, so it's OK for the upstream version of
get-collector-stats not to use that (but the Debian version should).

I was just worried about upgrades overwriting cron.d/cricket, but it
doesn't seem to do that. Sorry for not checking that, forget this point.

Thanks for your patience,

Ah, I see.  Yes, there were a couple of other utility programs which I
didn't realize needed access to the config tree.  I've patched them all for
the next Debian release.

gLogDir is present in the upstream release, but collect-subtrees didn't
allow for it to be overridden by cricket-conf.pl.  Since its naming
convention is such that it is a global variable, this was odd, and since it
needed to be overridden for the Debian setup, I just allowed it to be passed
in from above.

It would be very nice if the $subtreeTimes variable were moved into
cricket-conf.pl instead of being hardcoded in collect-subtrees.  This way,
it could be easily preserved across upgrades, and generally behave more as a
configuration variable should.