[fab] Metrics: What we *could* get

[Rahul Sundaram]

Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:

> 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?


See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204518 for my 
RFE on this.

>   * What software packages are widely installed?

http://alioth.debian.org/projects/popcon/

>   * What's the reliability of a package, based on a ratio of
>     "open bugs" to "instances installed"?

Fix Bug Buddy to work with Red Hat bugzilla. Install it by default and 
recommend it heavily instead of the web interface for reporting bugs. 
That should be a big boost in feedback.

> 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/)

Destined to be dead. We should have used HAL instead of Kudzu. Our 
Google SoC efforts so far with Fedora has nowhere been as useful as it 
could be. We should focus on smaller well defined projects and specific 
RFE's instead of picking projects that require ongoing development.


> 
> 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.

Agreed.

Rahul