On Mon, Jan 07, 2019 at 11:34:47AM -0500, Ben Cotton wrote:
== Summary ==
Right now, we estimate installed Fedora systems by counting unique IP
addresses which show up in our updates mirror statistics. We need
better data than that. There are some proposals for more complicated
systems, but a quick thing we can do is implement a per-system UUID
(unique identifier) and count that instead of IP addresses.
FWIW, I think that doing this is great idea. We can really use more
reliable information about the number of installations.
As Lennart wrote, using either sd_id128_get_machine_app_specific(3)
or `systemd-id128 new --app-specific=...` (new in F30) or an independent
reimplementation seems to right way to implement this.
== Upgrade/compatibility impact ==
Older versions will not have the UUID counting enabled; we will keep
collecting stats in the traditional way for those systems.
If the sd_id128_get_machine_app_specific/... mechanism is used, this
could be added to previous releases in a dnf update. This is an additional
advantage over having a indepdent uuid for this.
Zbyszek