smolt, hardware compatibility and package stats

[Christopher Blizzard]

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 07:54 -0400, Russell Harrison wrote:
> 
> 
> On 6/25/07, Christopher Blizzard <blizzard at redhat.com> wrote:
>         I actually think that we need to capture a small bit of that
>         information.  i.e. kernel, hal, pm-utils and whatnot.  But
>         catching
>         everything?  Probably not really needed for hardware
>         compat.  (Maybe
>         other things like NM, bluez-utils, etc.) 
>         
>         Just trying to keep the scope pretty small. :)
> 
> Understood,  it just seems to be about the same  amount of codding
> work to record everything  rather than filtering stuff out.  Now when
> you start talking about storage required. . . that is a different
> story. I think the reason I said it should be on the road map is in
> the future smolt can help with software compatibility as well.  Again
> not a high priority given the current scope of smolt, just one for the
> list.  

Right.

> 
> What may be very valuable from a hardware compat standpoint is a
> record of packages that aren't in the fedora repos, especially kernel
> modules.  We know people are going to be installing the nvidia and
> fglrx drivers, but what else are they installing because the stock
> kernel doesn't have drivers that do what they want.  
> 

I actually think that "loaded kernel modules" is one of the things we
want to capture for hardware compatibility questions.  You could ask
questions like "show me all the common modules for laptops that don't
suspend" and you might learn a lot from the query about which modules
may or may not be bad.  At least it's a decent set of data to query.

--Chris