Let me preface this by saying that I am aware of the large amounts of
bad blood existing between various Gentoo dev members and 'dma147'. I
was not poking around under the hood of Gentoo when things transpired,
so I am unaware of what happened... and frankly don't care to know what
happened.
dma147 has started a new Linux project --- linux-stats.org (LiSt). It
uses a client to poll files in proc and other such things to generate a
statistical profile of the user's machine, and then submit this info
(only if the user agrees to) to the LiSt servers, where it then compiles
things into collective statistical breakdowns. I would like to see
this client added to the official tree, but that requires a dev to be
maintainer and do a security audit of the client. Given that upstream
is dma147, this obviously isn't something most of the devs I talked to
on Freenode... errr.... "jumped at" so to speak. So I'm asking here if
anybody is willing to do this. If necessary I will serve as middle man
between bugzilla and upstream if that's the only way to see this
through. I think it a shame and unfair to the end user for this not to
be included just because of some spat between devs.
The details of LiSt:
All information is submitted anonymously as far as I can tell. By
default nothing is submitted without the user's approval. The user can
create a "public profile" page at linux-stats.org, but by default that
is disabled. As far as I can tell, almost everything is attained
simply by polling appropriate files within /proc (meaning this client is
severely crippled for people using user mode kernels).
The valuable end result is:
- An *accurate* database of hardware, generated from lspci polling by
client, where users can rate how it performs under Linux. This would be
of alot of use to me when building machines for myself and clients to
assure the best Linux experience possible.
- My inner geek loves truck loads of stats for how things are being
deployed as a whole... window managers, file systems, etc. If adopted
wide scale, it would be arguably the most accurate source of statistics
for kernel/fs/wm adoption etc.
If anybody is willing to become maintainer and perform an audit, please
reply. If anybody has questions, I have been temporarily voiced in
#gentoo-dev under the name GTswagger ... I will try to help answer your
questions as best I can if I'm around.
- Jeremy Sands
CS Undergrad, University of South Carolina
Columbia/NCAAbbs LUG
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