Hardware compatibility test: draft proposal

Hi,

As I mentioned in my blog[1], I kindof like the suggestion that Bdale
came up with during Debconf that we write a hardware compatibility test
of sorts that hardware vendors could run on their own hardware to test
whether Debian works on their system. The rationale for such a test:
while most of us know how Debian works and how one should test whether
their hardware actually works with Debian, it is not reasonable to
expect the same of hardware vendors for /all/ GNU/Linux distributions
out there. According to Bdale, currently all other major operating
system vendors, including the commercial Linux distributions, already
provide such a test to the hardware vendors. For this purpose, it is
okay if such a test is interactive to some extent (after all, it is
something that you would run on a hardware prototype in a lab, not on
each and every production machine), although I'm thinking a hardware
compatibility test could be useful in more cases, where it might be
better if it wasn't interactive.

So, after more than twelve hours of boredom on an airplane and half a
night of not-being-able-to-sleep-due-to-jetlag, which is certainly
enough to think about this problem, I came up with the following things
such a system could need:

- It should be modular. People who maintain driver packages for
  particular hardware may want to write additional tests that a vendor
  may want to run; and if this particular package supports it, the
  driver package maintainer may want to provide pointers to a particular
  package so that an inexperienced user may be able to configure their
  hardware after running the test themselves.
- The different tests should each be able to communicate what type of