[Popcon-developers] Re: [PATCH] Report Alpha subarchitectures

[Bill Allombert]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 03:35:57PM +0200, Falk Hueffner wrote:
> Bill Allombert <allomber at math.u-bordeaux.fr> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 03:47:26PM +0200, Falk Hueffner wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> once again, here's the Alpha subarch patch. Since the release is
> >> coming closer, and this information is needed to decide what to
> >> support for etch+1, I would be really grateful if somebody could
> >> either apply it, or tell me exactly what is wrong with it.
> >
> > The issue is that it is not OK for popcon to report arbitrary data
> > beyond what the specification says. This is a privacy issue and this
> > is more important than usefullness or convenience.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that the range of data
> reported by popcon cannot be extended ever in the future, or that this
> particular kind of data is too intrusive?

Both.  The range of data reported by popcon certainly cannot be extended
without adding an extra debconf question asking for permission on
upgrade. On the other hand, the package is called 'popularity-contest'
and its goal is to report data about packages usage and not data about
the hardware.  

So what I suggest you to do instead:

1) A poll on debian-alpha and debian-users. I am confident you will get
more answers that what popcon would provides given there are only 54
alpha machines reporting to popcon.

2) Data mining of the popcon results, by looking at usages of packages
specific of a certain subarchitecture (kernel, boot loader, driver
package, etc);

3) Look at other survey about hardware usage of Linux. 
(I do not remember URLs).

I hope it adresses your concern.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.