[gentoo-dev] RFP: System to account users configurations

[Rufiao <rufiao@gmx.net>]

As stated in bug #3778 (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3778):

1. Rationale

This system is inspired by Debian's popularity-contest package
(http://packages.debian.org/stable/misc/popularity-contest.html) with some 
important enhancements. The key idea is to provide means for the Gentoo
community to account the most used packages, hardware configurations, kernel
versions, compile flags and profiles. Additionaly, this system aims to 
provide the following advantages:

- Allow the creation of CD layouts which include the most used packages for
  each profile
- Allow the developers to investigate the most used configurations, and focus
  on them
  for setting priorities, documentation, standard kernel configurations, etc.
- Give some figures about the number of active users in the community

2. Description

The system comprises of 2 subsistems:

- A client-side system that runs periodically through cron to grab information
  from users' configurations and post them to the server system trhough HTTP.
  This system does not require any user intervention beyond the initial
  configuration.

- A server-side system running on the gentoo.org domain capable of receiving
  the information provided by the users, store them on a database and create 
  statistics with them. Also, it provides a web front-end to query the
  database.

The following information will be processed by the system:

- Packages installed, including their versions (as in 
  `qpkg -nc -I -v` from the gentoolkit package)
- Flags in make.conf (as in 
  `egrep "^(USE|CHOST|CFLAGS|CXXFLAGS)" /etc/make.conf`)
- CPU info (as in `egrep "^(model name|cpu MHz)" /proc/cpuinfo`)
- System memory (as in `egrep "^MemTotal:" /proc/meminfo`)
- PCI devices (as in 
  `lspci | colrm 1 8 | sed 's/\(.*\)(.*/\1/'` from the pciutils package)
- USB devices (as in `lsusb | grep iProduct | colrm 1 28` from the 
  usbutils packages)
- Kernel version (as in `uname -r`)
- Profile being used (as in
  `ls -ld /etc/make.profile | awk '{print $NF}' | awk -F/ '{print $NF}'`)

In the client side, the procedure to provide data for the system is the
following:

- User emerge the package, which:
  - Sets a crontab entry to let the system run periodically, possibly
    requiring user intervention to specify when the system should run
  - Points to an URL (in the gentoo.org domain) for signup
- User go to the provided url, which requests the e-mail from the user, and
  that the user transcribe a random 4-letters message shown as an image to
  a text box. These requirements are used to ensure, as long as possible,
  the autenticity of the data and to avoid automated signups
- The server-side system will e-mail the user with a key, which must be
  placed in the config file
- To post the information to the server-side system, the client-side system
  can use the proxy settings defined on /etc/make.conf
- In the first set of data the server-side system receives, it will e-mail
  a message to the user to let him know the system is running fine

Note that it is not guaranteed the system will have internet connectivity
when it gets run. In this case, it may keep periodically checking in the
background for a route to the server.

The following vars can be set on the config file:

- Key: as discussed above
- Acknowlege flag: send an e-mail to the user every time a set of data from
  him is processed (defaults to false)