[Lvfs-announce] New LVFS feature: Automatic Demotion of Firmware

Hi all,

I've just deployed a new feature to the LVFS: Automatic Demotion

As some of you know, firmware updates on the LVFS are applied by
users, who can then optionally send a "success" or "failure" report
back to the LVFS. Most firmwares have a success percentage close to
100% (which is good!) and "known failures" like too-low battery level
are returned back to the user as a message so they know what's gone
wrong. Now the LVFS is shipping nearly a million firmware files per
month to end-users (and most devices are updated within 48 hours of
the firmware appearing in stable), the potential for an accidentally
bad update causing a lot of problems very quickly is a very real
concern. A lot of vendors also don't use the download limits feature
of the LVFS, which restricts for instance one firmware version to
10,000 downloads per day.

It seems a very good idea to roll back updates that have been pushed
to stable that have a lot of reported problems. In this case, any
firmware that has a success percentage less than 70%, and has had more
than 5 "it's not working" reports will be pushed back into the embargo
remote from stable. As the firmware uploader or owner you can get
notification of this event, but it's opt-in for various reasons. By
visiting https://www.fwupd.org/lvfs/profile there is now a
"Notifications" area where you can enable the email.

I've retrospectively enabled this for all existing firmware. You can
change the limit (e.g. increasing the failure percentage to 95%, or to
raise the number of failed reports to 50) by visiting the individual
firmware "Limits" section. If you want to change the limit for all
firmwares you're already uploaded ask me and I can do this for you
easily.

If there is any firmware that is demoted, it can still be promoted
back to stable, although the failures will need to be addressed. If
there are any false positive failures not covered by the existing
"known issues" rules you can either create your own vendor-specific
issue or ask me for help where I can create a known issue for all
vendors.

Off-list questions very welcome.

Richard