Re: DEP 8: Gathering Django usage analytics
On Nov 07, 2016, at 01:21 PM, Brian May wrote:
>Should I ask on debian-devel?
I think you should, and I'll be very interested in that discussion.
Several packages in our team already apply deltas to upstream to disable
certain amounts of information gathering and reporting. The most common
example I've seen is removing a little bit of JavaScript that reports usage to
Google.
With my upstream hat on, I'm quite sympathetic to the goal of gathering usage
data. I often get asked "how many sites are using Mailman?" and I have to
answer "I don't know". Actually, you used to be able to do a Google search to
find references to various clues on the typical Mailman 2 listinfo page, but
since those same searches were being used to spam the FSF (and the Mailman
project), those have long been disabled. In any case, I'd love to be able to
provide some usage numbers, but oh well. (Maybe that's why we languish in
Negligible Funding Land. ;)
Donald Stufft mentions in a comment on the Django thread that he's thinking
about doing the same thing with pip. My initial reaction was that we'd have
to disable that out of privacy concerns. Or, if it's opt-out, we might have
to change the default to opt-in, which of course reduces participation rates
and makes upstreams unhappy.
I'd love to know if there's a Debian-wide policy on such things. E.g. if
"opt-out with informed user consent" was an official policy that we could
clearly point to and reference, it would greatly help provide guidance to both
Debian maintainers and upstreams.
Cheers,
-Barry
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