Thoughts on a hardware-specific bugzilla?

[David Timms]

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 15:33 -0400, Stewart Adam wrote:
>> I've been working out a few hardware bugs on a new laptop lately, and I
>> thought it would be interesting to create a specific category/product in
>> the current bugzilla for hardware bugs. Various components could be
>> listed as the different hardware categories (wifi, screen/backlight,
>> trackpad, keyboard, speakers, etc) and this way hardware issues could be
>> tracked separately from software bugs. Hopefully, this would help
>> hardware bugs
To me they would be in firmware, and non-fixable; unless the 
manufacturer is using loadable firmware to make the device usable. But 
that is really software in any case...

>> be resolved faster and it would be a good step forward for
>> getting more computers to work out of the box on a standard Fedora
>> install. Do you think it's worth it?
> 
> I'm wondering if this discussion doesn't belong on the
> cross-distribution list.
Is that because the hw issues tends to hit all distros ?

If there was such a thing, it would be good to base of or link to the 
smolt hardware database. You have probably seen the bit where you can 
indicate if your machine's bits work out of the box, with non-free 
driver, with extra config etc.

For the problem ones, the smolt entry can be used to create a wiki entry 
where any info {eg workaround, manual load, specific configs can be 
stored.}. bug tracking pointers could go in here as well.

There is also a more manual hw database on:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/

The think I like about smolt is that the submission of your machine's 
bit's IDs is automatic, along with some quick buttons to indicate how 
well the item worked. It might be nice for a machine side gui app to 
open your machine's smolt submission, rather than having to know the 
smoltX CLI stuff.