[maemo-developers] popularity-contest (was Re: Follow up from QA meeting on IRC)

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Nov 12, 2009, at 6:15, Quim Gil wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> ext Edward Page wrote:
>> Which reminds me, any reason Maemo doesn't use Debian's popularity contest?
> 
> At least at a community level there is
> https://garage.maemo.org/projects/popcon/

Bas (the founder of that project) and I have been discussing how to implement this. debian's popularity contest is definitely going to be used at the very least as inspiration, but hopefully its code as well. Right now it spends a lot of time trying to determine the last time a tool was used and that may be more relevant to a server environment than a mobile device. 

What I had hoped to do was to
	
	1. Create a md5 or sha1 hash of the device's MAC addres and IMEI as unique identifier which cannot be tracked back
	2. Check which repos the device is using, to see where the software comes from
	3. Ask dpkg what is installed
	4. Aggregate the dpkg output and rank that, roughly like popcon but perhaps doing some other cool things

I want to preserve as much privacy as possible on the device so anyone who participates is not identified. I know that I can only obfuscate data, not hide it completely, so I strongly feel this project should come with the advice that you may not want to use it. It also should not be a Nokia project because it is bad if Nokia is gathering information surreptitiously on its users. So let me be clear: this is a community project that is completely voluntary!

Jeremiah