It's been quite a while since this bug was discussed, but I have another
use case where it might be interesting...
There has been some recent discussion about "Architecture Variants" and
in particular amd64 variants. Fedora and Ubuntu are both working on
experiments with the goal of being able to optimize for newer versions
of the amd64 architecture (and potentially dropping older variants at
some point as well). Here is a page that gathers info on this idea for
Debian
https://wiki.debian.org/ArchitectureVariants
Knowing information about which variants our installed base is using
would help make these decisions easier. The past i386 decisions were a
little easier because there were particular packages we could look at to
get those numbers.
Side note....
In addition to this bug, it seems there are some other cases where
people would like to press popcon into service to gather other things:
kernel modules
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=202675
report arch only
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=545000
report foreign architectures
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931764
Package versions
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=97045
aptitude auto flag
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=313194
package config file data
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=816281
We can understand why it is tempting to want to do so. But there are
also privacy and scope implications. So maybe the first step is a clear
policy of what is appropriate for popcon to do, and the things that
aren't should be WONTFIX.
Thanks,
--
Matt Taggart
m...@lackof.org
