RH recommends using Windows? plus a Question!

[Jef Spaleta]

Michael K. Johnson wrote:

> Say you are searching for video card foo.  It has average rating bar.
> You want to look into this more, so you click on "read all reports"
> Reports that look interesting, you click on "see hardware" and you
> have the entire hardware database for the machine (we probably
> shouldn't include things like tag ids from dmidecode :-) and you
> can see what the context is.  Some main things (say motherboard
> version, running kernel version, that type of thing) can be displayed
> in short form with the review.

Well i was thinking take it a step further down the fancy metric...and
allow people to specify a few core components in one query and have
crossed referenced reports pop up in a most/least relevant listing.
I'd imagine there will be a metric crapload of reports for certain video
cards. Being able to narrow down by picking your mobo and maybe even
your monitor could help sort the initial list of reports you are going
to pull up, just by bringing any relevant mobo/card issues up to the
top. 

> Then, if you really want to get fancy, you add the ability to add
> comments to individual reports.  You happen to know that the reason
> the video card foo didn't work on that system is that there's a
> conflict with bios version J.UNK on that particular motherboard.
> So you post a annotation to that effect.

Hmm..is it wise to make it point and click easy to list brokenness in a
hardware database that is completely seperate from bugzilla? I'd really
hate to lose useful bugreports to comments in the hardware database and
make developers have to troll the hardware reviews as well to find out
if a piece of hardware has a problem. A review based hardware database 
makes some sense as an end-user tool for people choosing hardware to
use, but i don't know if it makes sense as a tool for developers to keep
track of specific hardware issues...and i'd hate to see review comments
become the prefered end-user way to report problems...but have bugzilla
be the preferred developer way to track problems.  


> If you want to get really fancy, you do an advogato-like voting
> structure so that consistently clueful reporters have their
> ratings weighted higher in producing the averages.

Well i vote for mocking up the forum side of this with a pre-existing
forum codebase if at all possible. A specially crafted advogato reporter
client to script the hardware reports to submit would be simple for
someone to bootstrap together i would imagine. But would  a stock
advogato forum provide enough initial usefulness as a target forum
platform to play with? Is linux-usb.org device database a useful example
of this sort of thing minus the advogato ranking system?

http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/

-jef"just looking for a good pre-existing starting point"spaleta
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