[Popcon-developers] [Patch] Would like to help out with popcon, extensions to hardware info

[Bill Allombert]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2011 at 01:17:58PM -0700, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am interested in helping out with patches to popcon.  I've
> attached a sample patch, though I realize it will need to be
> reformatted.  But I would like to get some comments on the proposed
> changes, as one of them is large.
> 
> The patch fixes a few minor typos, and does two bigger things:

Which ? I only found one (in clean-filter).

> 2) I'd like to propose extending popcon to report some limited
> hardware details.  I'm interested in eventually submitting a patch
> to have popularity-contest report machines on which suspend and
> resume are working properly for energy savings.  In order to do that
> requires knowing the vendor and model of the motherboard.
> 
> Having an idea of the hardware in use can help guide regression
> testing, and more importantly help users select hardware.  In this
> case if the goal is to build a Linux box with maximum power savings,
> it is very helpful to know which types of hardware work well with
> suspend in the field.
> 
> Popcon was designed to collect package data.  But it has a large
> installed base, which makes it a very interesting platform to
> collect hardware data.
> Plus it's written in Perl, which I like ;-).
> 
> The privacy implications of collecting such data seem compatible, in
> spirit at least, with the privacy implications of what popcon is
> doing now.  What are your thoughts?  How open are you to extending
> popcon's scope?

Very little, for two reasons. First it would be a large breach of trust if
popcon would start to report non-package related data without giving the users
a chance to opt-out. Secondly, collecting data is the easy part of the job. The
hard part is to get meaningful results from the data.
The worse outcome is that we collect data that we do not need, but allow third party
to use them in way we disapprove of.

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

Imagine a large red swirl here.