Feature to attach multiple Hardware Profiles to user accounts for bugfixers to access

I can only agree with this request. It would ensure a minimum standard of information in bugs reports and would (assuming it were written) allow a correlation function to be run on the hardware belonging to the commenters of a particular bug, identifying common parts. It could even be used to warn people about to post to a bug that their hardware is different to that of all the other commenters and thus their issue is probably not the same and that they may be better off looking for another bug or filing a new bug...

I wouldn't trouble users with having to make decisions regarding filing a new bug or not. That should be the job of tools and eventually the developers.

But I totally agree that this feature request would be very helpful in cutting down on bug reports with incomplete information. The way I envision this could work would be something like this:

- After a new Ubuntu install, the user would be given the option of creating a Launchpad account or using an existing one.
- The user would also be asked if the hardware information could be sent to Ubuntu. This would, in turn launch a script that would get all the relevant HW info from /proc, /sys, lspci, etc.
- Due to privacy concerns, the user would have the following options to have the HW info attached to his profile:
   * Do not attach (Keep anonymous)
   * Attach to profile (public)
   * Attach to profile (private - visible to people belonging to a certain group - 'triager' perhaps?)
- When the user files a bug, upon checking the box 'Attach HW info', the relevant files would be linked to from the bug.
- Hand waving: There could be a tool for devels and triagers that scans through the HW info attached to bugs and find patterns regarding the kind of bugs for a particular piece of HW.

The privacy issue is perhaps, moot, since the user has to reveal the HW info for any effective resolution of the bug.

The users should not be bothered with too much decisions I suppose. We
don't want to go down the M$ road of a million questions.

He should instead be informed, that all data has been anonymized,
meaning CPU IDs, MAC addresses and so forth have been excluded, deleted
or replaced by bogus.

Message could be something like this:
"For enabling us to provide better support for your system, we kindly
ask you to agree to this tool submitting your hardware information to
launchpad. For your privacy all data has been anonymized already!"

"Ubuntu developers will use this information to fix bugs you might find
in the system"

A HW DB feature would suddenly make all "Yes, I have this bug too"
comments on bug reports very helpful, since devs therefore could query
for which HW is affected.

HW info should most likely only be accessible for bug fixers. Maybe it
does not hurt to have it publicly available. Anyhow, we should find out
what suits us best and go for it without asking the users any questions.

By the way, one direction we did not think yet, on how this tool could
also assist bug fixers, is bug verification. A dev can find users with a
specific hardware set, which have not yet participated in the bug report
and pose the question if they also experience the bug or not. A mass
mail could be sent out to a random subset of users with the same HW with
two embeded URLs for "yes, the bug exists on my system" and "no, it does
not."

Users would be asked in the initial HW DB submission process , if they
would want to participate in such a way to further improve Ubuntu's
quality.

Since HW manufacturers do not assist much yet in testing our OS on their
machines, lets take our users a bit closer and improve the way they can
do the testing for us.

I have installed Ubuntu on my family's Laptops and on friend's machines.
I can convince them to use the system, because it has obvious
advantages. But I could not get them to submit bug reports in the
current situation, because they would clearly be overstrained by the
process of submitting valuable information for bug fixing such as HW
information.

So I end up being their bug reporter, which also quadruples the amount
of time I have to spend to submit the needed info. It is also hard
enough to do this for one system, now imagine you have to do it for 10.
And this again and again for each and every bug.

Elias