[Popcon-developers] Adding CPU arch statistics to popcon

[Bill Allombert]

On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 01:11:20PM +0100, Martin Guy wrote:
> Hi
>    I'm wondering if its feasible to extend popcon to give statistics
> for the CPU architecture in use. Certainly for the ARM port this would
> be useful as there are often discussions of which ARM instruction set
> to support as a baseline.
>   In i386 world, this would be like saying "does anyone really run
> Debian on a 486 any more?", to know when it is feasible to increase
> the minimum CPU requirements to the benefit of everyone with more
> recent processors.

I do not think it would be very fair, because low-end systems are less likely to
run popularity-contest than more recent systems, so the fact that none of them are
running popularity-contest would not imply that there are none.

>   I would imagine some people would be concerned about
> anonimity/security issues implied by identifying people's specific
> CPUs. In our case, the supported instruction set, and maybe whether it
> has an FPU, is the interesting statistic, not so much the specific
> silicon in use.

This issue has been discussed in the past. I have no objection for popcon to
report sub-architecture and/or CPU *provided* there is a canonical/official
way to retrieve this information from a Debian system (e.g. an hypothetical
dpkg --print-subarchitecture) that work consistently on linux/kfreebsd/hurd.

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.