Re: The number of etch installations is rocketing...

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Lars Wirzenius]
> However, changing the popcon debconf question to something like the
> following might be an acceptable compromise:
>
>         Would you like to participate in the Debian package popularity
>         contest meter? Blah blah blah. You may also choose to only
>         report once that you have installed this release of Debian on a
>         new machine. In that case no other information from you or your
>         machine gets recorded.
>         
>         [ ] No, I do not want to participate at all.
>         [ ] I want to report once that I have installed Debian.
>         [ ] I want to participate in the package popularity contest.

Interesting idea.  Perhaps it deserve a wishlist request in BTS?

> The new choice would then do something like generate a UUID for the
> machine and do a single HTTP query to report it and the contents of
> /etc/debian_version.

Actually, I've considered adding hardware reporting to popcon, using a
separate question (or more options, not sure which), and hardware
reports do not need to be sent as often as package usage.  Such
report-once setting should report the output of lsmod, lspci,
dmidecode, lsusb etc, to allow us to know what hardware is in use out
there.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen