Measuring success/failure in the installation

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 11:44:26AM +0100, Evan Dandrea wrote:
> 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.

This is an excellent idea, thanks for undertaking it.

> I will obviously make the code for this open source, and publish the results
> to a public-facing website.

Could you provide some additional details about your implementation
plans?  I was contemplating doing something similar for collecting GPU
lockup statistics, so am curious.

> 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.

You might make the absence of a functioning network also be an accepted
way to disable the functionality.

> 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.

You mentioned you'd pass the uuid once after the installation completed,
and once again on boot.

Would you be open to including one more uuid return, following the first
login attempt?  I know it probably doesn't matter for a ubiquity
perspective, but there are several classes of issues that result in a
bootable but unusable system, and something like this would give a
better measure for % installations that result in a working system.

Bryce