On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 4:14 PM, Evan Dandrea <e...@ubuntu.com> wrote: > While we have a set of unit tests and a continuous integration system doing > system testing of the installer, we ultimately have no idea what the failure > rate is in the real world. > > Without this information, we have no means of actually measuring the true > quality of the installation experience. It may look gorgeous and be > dead-simple to use, but that's worthless if it's not leading to people using > Ubuntu. > > I am therefore proposing that we actually measure this. In Oneiric, I would > like to add code to ubiquity that, once connected to the Internet, sends a > GUID as generated by uuidgen. At the end of installation it would send this > again, and the pair of values in a database would constitute a successful > installation. Finally, it will send this value one last time, at first boot, > to ensure that the system actually works. From this point the GUID will be > discarded and never used again. > > I will obviously make the code for this open source, and publish the results > to a public-facing website. > > The user will be able to disable this functionality by preseeding a > well-documented key. The documentation will include a brief visual overview of > how to accomplish this, for those unaccustomed to preseeding the installer. > > This addition to the installer will keep us honest. With real data to hand, it > will be very difficult to ignore the problem if ubiquity regresses in its > failure rate from release to release. > > --
Hello, I've talked to one person who had their hard disk wiped out during an upgrade. But the person I know was a bit frustrated at that point (and understandably so) to file a bug report with proper information. At this point, as Evan says, its not clear how common such incidents are, and test suites may not be able to give us a clear picture of real world. I support this idea and would gladly help build the web interface to this. On a side note, we must remember the implications of this. We would effectively be tracking the installs causing a lot of press (possibly negative). We should probably either only opt-in to submit data or have a very clear opt out option. Cheers Nigel -- ubuntu-devel mailing list ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel