[GSOC] Automated usage statistic collection

[Sanket Agarwal]

Hi,

I was browsing through some of the ideas (after a long time infact) and
found the above interesting for multiple reasons.

* It has a wide scope of adoption for Pidgin, it's always very useful to
see which features are most used and hence has a large acceptability.
* The bug reporter can be used to detect common/critical bugs in early
stage and provide a better remedial procedure to users.

I was going through the tasks and had the following final product that
could be targeted:

* We can possibly have something like [1] to report various statistic

Adium uses something called Sparkle [3] to handle their updation engine and
anonymous usage statistic collector. It's a very Mac oriented solution,
which is used for statistics and automated software updation. it'll be nice
if the community could suggest a few solutions while I am searching.

* Crash reporting

Also I found crash reporting interesting, there is an existing solution for
reporting bugs at google-breakpad [2]. What it does in short is to bind
with the project, watch it in a separate thread and when the main project
crashes it spits a dump file. This dump can then be uploaded to whatever
server we want, where it will be needed to be coupled with a build
containing the actual symbols (again compiled with google-breakpad) etc.
The traceback can be rendered. It'll require a lot of effort to render the
traceback properly. AFAIK Firefox already uses it.

Cheers
--Sanket

[1] -- http://www.adium.im/sparkle/<http://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=13&graph=line>
[2] -- http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/wiki/LinuxStarterGuide
[3] -- http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/
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