HardwareDatabaseClientOverhaul

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Summary

Rationale

Use cases

  • Markus maintains the Linux machines of many of his friends, his mother and father. Most of them are not as passionate about bug reporting as Markus would want them to be. So bugs usually are reported to him and he then creates proper bug reports in Launchpad. Every once in a while some bug appears to be Hardware related and the bug fixers request additional Hardware information. Fortunately, due to the latest developments, Markus was able to create a detailed hardware profile for each of the machines he maintains right after installing Ubuntu on them. The HWDB tool enabled him to attach the gathered hardware information to his launchpad account. So now every time he reports a HW specific bug to launchpad, all he has to do is select the machine affected from some menu and the Hardware information is automatically available for the bug fixers review.
  • Felix is a bug fixer. He mainly works on hardware related bugs. Due to the latest developments for launchpad, he now is able to query for a list of all hardware affected by the bug he is working on. He has some tools to narrow the result down to only USB chipsets or WLAN NICs just as he pleases.
  • Information about a machine to help diagnosing a bug report
  • Locating users willing to assist with testing new upstream versions that may fix their issue
  • Providing hardware statistics when communicating to vendors (anonymous data)
  • Laptop testing and certification
  • Highlighting hardware/driver combination conflicts
  • Comparing before/after situations when swapping between two alternate drivers.

Scope

Design

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion

  • Please review bug #3382. As described in the two use cases I added above, HWDB could tremendously improve the quality of bug reports, as well ease the burden for those who report bugs for the many different machines they maintain.

  • Once the data is filtered and anonymized, apport should include the ID in bug reports
  • Remove the bling stuff from hwdb-client (gnome-canvas prevents i18n), i18n and HIGify it. Also remove the comment field since it looks like bug reports through the backdoor
  • Fedora's smolt project looks promising; we might be able to share code/db with those and should merge the wizard style

  • Allow HWDB client to be run a second time, such as if a user changes hardware or if the submit didn't work (if it's already implemented, make it an easy-to-find button)
  • See www.dohickey-project.com for an interesting hardware database program.
  • There's another program for gathering hardware information: http://hardware4linux.info/

  • There is also an older similar spec: ExtendHwdb

  • And there is a newer spec too: BetterHardwareDatabase


CategorySpec

HardwareDatabaseClientOverhaul (last edited 2008-12-09 21:07:17 by jan4)