Measuring success/failure in the installation

[Neil Jagdish Patel]

Hey,

On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 11:44 +0100, Evan Dandrea 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.

Excellent idea :)

> 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.

Sounds reasonable.

> 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.

I'm not versed on the installer, but would this mean that at the boot
screen (where you can select keyboard layout etc in text mode), you
could just have an option to disable this?


Regards,

-- 
Neil Jagdish Patel | Technical Lead
Desktop Experience Team
Canonical
27 Floor, Millbank Tower
London SW1P 4QP
Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings
www.canonical.com