attach HW profiles to launchpad accounts and reference HW profiles in bug reports

This is highly relevant, I hope this gets fixed soon with perhaps a tool or something (either hardinfo) or something else which is easy to upload. One solution could be to have an applet or something which uses something like lshw & puts it in categories.

2007-05-21: jjs - I hope I can have this scheduled later this year. It's not dead yet. :-)

I consider this an extremely valuable extension to launchpad. Imagine if everybody could easily attach his hardware profile to a bug.

Bug fixers could query for hardware similarities to find out which hardware components faulty systems have in common.
One could open a general "hibernation not working" bug and devs could as mentioned above track down, which hardware sucks the most.
They could track down, which of the faulty hardware is out there in the greatest numbers to concentrate their fixing work on that one.

The HW DB Client by the way should also query for whether hibernation and suspend are working, even though this might not be considered important. Maybe it is just not in there, because somebody is afraid of the results. But at least, people could access the DB before they buy a laptop and find out if these things work. How can I query the HW DB by the way?

AFAIK the HW DB cannot be queried or looked into presently.

I think I read somewhere that Ubuntu is integrating some HW DB thingy from RedHat. This could provide the necessary information and should be linked with launchpad.

I find it is absolutely necessary to be able to attach hardware profiles to launchpad user accounts. I would then simply say, this happens on Feisty on my machine XY and the bugfixing guys could immediately access the right record in the HW DB. Now they have to over and over again request us to send lspci outputs, lshw outputs, ....

Isn't it the purpose of programming to relieve us from things that we have to do over and over again in exactly the same way? Isn't that what computers are for, to do exactly these stupid always the same operations?

Please use your voice as bug fixers, as the people most annoyed by this, to get canonical to implement such a feature in launchpad!

I have also filed this feature as a launchpad bug, as I have no idea where it really belongs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/135542

Debian's reportbug command prepares a mail with a lot of useful information, given the name of the affected package or the affected executable. Launchpad should have some place where such info can be cut from some program's output (a customised version of reportbug would do perfectly) and pasted together with the bug report.

All this can only work if the reporter knows which is the executable or package affected.

The Debian approach is good. For Debian guys, but not for my Mother though. It would find it best if users could report bugs from within the Ubuntu GUI environment they are used to. However it is hard to give users a gtk GUI for reporting bugs, since you would have to get all the functionality of the launchpad bug reporting section in there. Duplicated effort. Somehow defeats the purpose.

However, actually all they really need is to get a tool that helps them to submit their hardware info - ONCE - and create a launchpad account at the same time (if not previously created). Then they can be taken to launchpad by the "Report a Problem" magic, which actually should have its place in the System menu, not only in the applications Help section! They then, as described above can simply reference which Systems are affected by the bug they report. They would only need to click a checkbox. Not even that, if they only have one single HW profile attached to their account.

However it has to be possible to attach more than one HW profile to your account. I for example manage the machines of my parents and some friends as well. And I usually report their bugs. So I should have a checkbox choice for which System is affected.

[quote] However it has to be possible to attach more than one HW profile to your account. I for example manage the machines of my parents and some friends as well. And I usually report their bugs. So I should have a checkbox choice for which System is affected.[/quote]

same here. I do the same :)

Hmm. I see what elias is saying and I'm wondering if this is actually two related bugs (easy gathering tool / database of reports that can be referenced) rather than just one. I believe it should be possible to solve the first without solving the later at the cost of duplicated information in bug reports. The catch with this is that those people who take the time to report multiple issues are the ones who are punished the most until the database part is implemented...

On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 06:37 +0000, Sitsofe Wheeler wrote:
> Hmm. I see what elias is saying and I'm wondering if this is actually
> two related bugs (easy gathering tool / database of reports that can be
> referenced) rather than just one. I believe it should be possible to
> solve the first without solving the later at the cost of duplicated
> information in bug reports. The catch with this is that those people who
> take the time to report multiple issues are the ones who are punished
> the most until the database part is implemented...
>

Please add the bug numbers you are referring to.

elias:
I was thinking of the many bugs where I asked you for the same information you gave elsewhere (so anyone interested can rifle through your bug page).

well this might be a blueprint for hardy

+1 for getting this released!!

@ Sitsofe Wheeler
[quote] The catch with this is that those people who take the time to report multiple issues are the ones who are punished the most until the database part is implemented...

While actually the DB is already there, somehow, as is the info gathering tool. While I am not sure what exact info the HW DB tool is collection. Anyhow there is even some tool from RedHat I think to have read about some time ago.

But in the end, I would not worry as much about the gathering part as about the "being able to attach to launchpad profile, bug reports and polls" part (read about the poll part in the updated feature description on top). This is the part to concentrate on! The gathering part would already be served well enough, if I could attach one lshw output, one lspci, ... per System, still gathered by hand, to my profile.

The real benefit lies in the advanced possibilities a dev has to track down a bug and therefore a better working distro for me.

+1
I think this feature will improve Ubuntu and give it a competitive advantage.

I really suggest someone writes a blueprint for this suggestion (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/malone/). (It's kinda out of place as a bug report, so there's little chance anyone will notice it here.)

Please vote for this idea at: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1497/

I'm updating this to reflect our updated bug triage - we don't use the medium category anymore: we pull bugs forward to high from low as our priorities change. This bug, while interesting, isn't in the current roadmap for active development.