[fab] Metrics: What we *could* get

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Fri, 6 Oct 2006, Christopher Blizzard wrote:

> There's another interesting aspect of having something on the machine 
> that allows someone to be counted.  It follows the software all the way 
> from where we put it up, through the mirrors and down to the 
> installation.  It's much more reliable about reporting something in that 
> sense, rather than collecting stats from mirrors and download sites.
> 
> It also reports the act - "I'm using it" instead of "I downloaded it."
> 
> And last, in some ways it's a lot less nefarious than tracking 
> downloads.  It's a result of a positive act on part of the user, as 
> opposed to tracking on the backend without any kind of positive assent 
> from the user.
> 
> --Chris

Yep.

If we're going to bother doing actual engineering work for a measurement 
solution in FC7, then it should be:

  a. Voluntary;
  b. Anonymous;
  c. Incredibly comprehensive;
  d. Clearly beneficial to users.

And when I say "incredibly comprehensive," I mean that it should collect 
hardware information and package information, and we should focus on 
deriving *useful* data from these metrics.  Like:

  * What hardware works well, and what doesn't?
  * What software packages are widely installed?
  * What's the reliability of a package, based on a ratio of
    "open bugs" to "instances installed"?

We've had these ideas before.  RHN collected *most* of this data back in 
the RHL days, but no one ever made it a priority to mine this data, so it 
just sat there, useless.  Pootypedia, which was intended to do the 
hardware cataloging, was sponsored by SoC in the summer of '05, and never 
went anywhere.  (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pootypedia/)

Again, these ideas are not rocket science.  It's basic client-server
stuff, a little bit of XMLRPC, a little bit of Python, a well-maintained
database server.  We just need to decide that these projects are
important, and then we need to set up a team that's responsible for
executing them.

If we were to have a hackfest, this would be, for me, one of the most 
interesting projects.

--g

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