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List:       mandrake-cooker
Subject:    [Cooker] [Bug 20177] [harddrake] NEW: Automation of input into Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)
From:       "awilliamson () mandriva ! com" <bugzilla () qa ! mandrivalinux ! com>
Date:       2006-03-31 20:22:03
Message-ID: bug20177.20060331202203.387343 () qa ! mandriva ! com
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User ID: 7200, 46 bugs reported (24 fixed, 5 duplicate, 3 invalid), 979 comments.

http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=20177





------- Comment #9 from awilliamson@mandriva.com  2006-03-31 22:22 -------
To give a progress report here, work on the HCL itself has slowed down as the
team now responsible for it is very busy with the Kiosk project, but a good
piece of news is that the new HCL is planned to be integrated with the new
'Start' page we're currently working on (will be the default home page for
Mandriva browsers, replacing the current http://start.mandriva.com/ ).


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------- Reminder: -------
assigned_to: tvignaud@mandriva.com
status: NEW
distribution: cooker
creation_date: 
description: 
Hello,

Getting quality information in sufficient amounts in an HCL is very difficult.
You need to convince people to take the effort to go to the specific website and
manually introduce lots of stuff. Average users just don't bother. As a result
the information in an HCL is always very meager. That is why automation could
help a lot in this respect.

How would this work?
During installation or during first boot wizard, the goal of this automated HW
information gathering should be explained. There the user should be able to
indicate they DO NOT want to participate (so by default willingness for
participation is assumed). The people that indicate not to be willing to
participate are not bothered further.
One month after install the participating users get a screen automatically (much
like the first time wizard) that lists all their HW (as known by harddrake). At
that moment they are asked whether there was HW that did not work out of the box
and they can indicate it, with two types (did not get it working at all or
needed some fiddling to get it working). In case they indicated fiddling was
required, they are asked to described what they had to do in order to get it
working). All HW that was not indicated as not working out of the box gets noted
as working out of the box. All this information (including installed version of
Mandriva) is sent to Mandriva, much like the drakstat reports on installed rpms.
The information received is used to populate the HCL.

RESULTS:
Short term:
The HCL will get heavily populated starting about a month after the release of
the first version that includes this functionality (even if only a small
percentage of Mandriva users is willing to participate).
People chosing for a distro will have a very good source to verify how well
Mandriva supports their HW. Mandriva users wanting to buy new HW will finally be
able to know whether the new HW will work at all with Mandriva. People that are
stuck with a certain type of HW and don't get it easily going with a standard
install, get look up this HW on the HCL and check how others got it going.
Mandriva developers might have a good source to improve HW compatibility (there
where fiddling is required, it means that the standard installation or the
harddrake behavior could often easily be improved so that it would work out of
the box in the next release, the users will tell you what needs to be done).
Long term:
The Mandriva HCL will become a reference in the Linux landscape. HW vendors will
be wanting to make sure to be favourable in the list, so they might be getting
proactive to get it working in Mandriva. Mandriva will differentiate itself even
more as having the best HW compatibility and hence become even more popular.

Effort required:
Seems fairly limited to me. Harddrake already gathers the HW information. The
first time wizard could be reused for the the UI part to gather the user
feedback and the drakstat code could be reused for the module to transfer of the
collected information. Of course the HCL DB should be modified to be able to
store and treat the information collected this way, and the HCL webinterface
should be modified to allow easy look-up in the new types of information. All in
all this could be done fairly easily I think.

Further improvements:
In order to make sure that really all information possible is gathered, in a
second stage, harddrake should get some memory. I mean by that that it stores
information on HW that was once hooked up to the machine. Otherwise HW that did
not work and was in the mean time already removed will not be reported upon. The
same for HW that is only once in a while hooked up to the machine: USB sticks,
photo cameras, camcorders, etc.

I hope that you agree with me that such a tool would really be an asset to the
Mandriva distribution and that you will really consider the implementation of
this idea.

Kind Regards,

Wim
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