HardwareDatabaseRoadmap

Revision 15 as of 2005-04-28 02:36:11

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Hardware Database Roadmap

Create a roadmap for the Ubuntu hardware database and related projects

More than 20000 datasets in < 30 days (currently 755 submissions a day on average)
Collecting device and bios data, as well as xorg log/config and boot data
Client points you to your online record on the second run
Postgres server solution is in the desired target
No inclusion of the client in reportbug yet (automated inclusion of the hwdb ID in bugreports)
Client needs improvement to have the full planned feature set

Analyze data collected in the database
Import the data into a system suitable for reporting
Generate summary reports
- How well a certain device is supported, and how popular it is
- What fraction of users are having a good experience with a subsystem (e.g., sound)

Two very important use cases:

Desktop bug reporting tool: make it very convenient for the user to provide this additional information when submitting a new bug
Online bug reporting tool: don't require an ID, but make it part of the dialogue between bug triager and reporter ("could you please create a hardware database ID for your computer and paste it in here?)"

Server sided:

Move the whole data and server application to a dedicated machine in the datacenter
Offer existing information from the website -- the raw file collected is fine after some cleanup in the xml.
Remove UUID, Serial number and MAC address from collected information.
Remove these fields from existing entries; using a CGI to filter them would be fine.
Disabling HTTP logs for submissions to ensure it's impossible to link submission to IP address of sender.
Using a flat file database is fine; designing a real SQL database will take more time and the flat file is useful /now/, at least for bug reports.
A real DTD needs to be designed for this thing at one point.
Write a online device manager application to make the presentation of the raw data more userfriendly
After the real SQL DB is in place:
- Getting hardware statistics and detailed reports
- Determining the quality of our current hardware support
- Find good/bad supported HW to improve the situation
- Invent some server security to prevent us from being slashdotted by marketing companies that might try to hook up scripts to our data

Client sided:

Rearrange the untranslateable parts * invent some server security to prevent us from being slashdotted by marketing companies that might try to hook up scripts to our data of the code to be gettext translatable and put the .po file in rosetta
Additional automated test sets, including checks for second network, sound and video card
Client-side update functionality for the dataset
Pull more kernel information/module data and settings (use hal's defined but yet unused module options)
Get more patches into the upstream hal version (easier with the new hal 0.5), to make hwdb-client usable in debian too (we get some malformed datasets from crossgraders with the wrong hal version but don't want to tighten the dependencies)
A new rocking "breezy" GUI so the user cant resist playing with it and just must submit

Common (not roadmap related) stuff:

Make the client configurable, so it can send to a local server instead
Make a local server package for integration in standalone intranet helpdesk systems
Building a base for ubuntu HardwareCertification