Wineconf follow up: Wine Usage Data Collection

James Hawkins truiken at gmail.com
Thu Oct 9 13:19:43 CDT 2008


On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Chris Ahrendt <celticht32 at aol.com> wrote:
> Alexandre Julliard wrote:
>> "Henri Verbeet" <hverbeet at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> 2008/10/8 Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com>:
>>>> Currently, we've got two problems:
>>>> 1) We want to collect Wine usage data, so we know where to concentrate
>>>> our efforts.
>>> Just curious, but do any actual developers really care about this? My
>>> feeling is that bugzilla gives a pretty good idea of what people are
>>> having trouble with already. (Not necessarily trying to shoot it down,
>>> but keep in mind that receiving and processing the data will require
>>> some infrastructure as well, and I wonder if it's worth all the
>>> trouble.)
>>
>> I'm very skeptical too. I certainly don't think it's worth all the
>> complexity that has been discussed around here, and in any case it can't
>> be allowed to slow down the normal app startup code path.
>>
>> If there's really a need for this, it should be done somewhat like the
>> Debian tracker, say by having a package that installs a cron job that
>> looks for exe files and sends a list of the ones that have been accessed
>> recently, or something along those lines.
>>
> Problem with that Alexandre is that alot of people get freaked out when
> you start talking about doing that sort of thing. Several companies have
> tried it and people had alot of problems with it.
>
> So this gets down to the base question what are we trying to accomplish
> with this functionality that we are not getting now with the current
> process? What can we change in the current process that would enhance
> that to fill the short comings?  Does anything need to be changed?
>
> Personally, for what its worth, I think our time would be better spent
> improving some form of error detection so that users would have an
> easier time identifying where the issues might be. Automated dump
> process and upload would be my thought. Then when the dump is recieved
> it can be parsed with something along the lines of patchwatcher  to
> determine the component that failed. If we want we could even have the
> user opt in at that point to send the dump in or just trash it.
>
> Thoughts?
>

We have a hard enough time determining which component is causing the
bug as it is.  It would be near impossible to automate that detection.

-- 
James Hawkins



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