Re: Automatically collect hardware information from users?
Luca Capello <luca@pca.it> writes:
> Hello!
>
> On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:56:53 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>> [Goswin von Brederlow]
>>> Shouldn't that be included in popularity-contest?
>>
>> Well, I have had the same idea, but never found time to implement
>> it. It could be added as an option to popularity-contest, but not
>> as part of the normal popcon submission as it would require approval
>> from each individual sysadmin with popcon installed before reporting
>> hardware information. On the other hand, the hardware content in a
>> machine changes very rarely, while the package list change fairly
>> regularly.
>
> Another solution could be to add the feature to popularity-contest,
> but only for the first submission and controlled by a debconf question
> when the package is installed (thus the sysadmin can approve it).
I don't see any difference in the hardware and software info. Both
need to be approved and popcon does ask.
As for implementing it I would have reportbug make up the report,
generate its md5sum (or sha1). If the md5sum does match the last (any
one of the last) report only the md5sum is send. Otherwise a full
hardware report is added.
There are hardware things that do change daily. People plug in usb
device or remove them. pcmcia/cardb us cards are frequently inserted
and removed. Nowadays you can even hot-plug ram and cpus.
I'm not sure how popcon could gather stats for usb usage but maybe it
could watch for events. The hardware report could then include "Usb
storage: 10% used this week". But maybe that is too much. A simple
"Usb storage: yes" would help too. The difference would be that it
records that it is used and not just that is is available.
>> I suspect it is a good idea to set up the collector as part of
>> popcon.debian.org, but let the hardware reporting system be a
>> standalone package reporting when the machine is installed or
>> something like that, instead of weekly.
>
> Well, doesn't the debian-installer report [1] [2] already fulfill the
> latter case, i.e. when the machine gets installed the first time?
Can that be send in via http and does it automatically ask if it
should do that? Last I checkd it didn't. Might be a good idea though.
> Just my 0.02â?¬...
>
> Thx, bye,
> Gismo / Luca
>
> Footnotes:
> [1] /var/log/debian-installer/*
> [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=installation-reports
MfG
Goswin
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