Automatically collect hardware information from users?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

I just discovered ubuntu got a tool I have been planning to make for
Debian, the hwdb-client package making it trivial for the user to
submit information about their hardware to a central location.  The
source for it is available from
<URL:ftp://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/h/hwdb-client/>, and the
data is submitted to <URL:http://hwdb.ubuntu.com/>.

Anyone know more about this?  That database would make the life of us
discover-data maintainers a lot easier.  Should we set up our own
database, or can we get access to and a copy of the Ubuntu database?

I notice Mandriva have a similar system also called hwdb-clients, and
it report info to <URL:http://hwdb.mandriva.com/>.  Is this a similar
system or the same system?

It should be fairly easy to port the Ubuntu client to Debian, and the
user-visible server part is a script accepting HTTP put/post.  It seem
to be very similar to the popularity-contest HTTP collector.  The
interesting parts of the server on the other hand would be the parts
making reports based on the reported hardware information.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen