Hi Antenore, Thanks for the quick reply. On Mo 25 Mai 2020 15:24:44 CEST, Antenore Gatta wrote:
Hi Christoph, Upstream developer… I think it's a bit exaggerated to say that is a privacy violation.
Debian users expect from Debian, to be a safe harbour, so all package maintainers are requested to patch out code that does unwanted / uncontrollable connections to the internet for stats collections and such.
We just get a plain text file from https://remmina.org (e.g. https:// remmina.org/news/remmina_news.php?ver=1.4.5) with the new changelog.
While I understand the interest in usage statistics, in Debian we cannot have that part of the phoning-home code. I am sorry.
Remmina on a regular basis verify if there's a new file or if the file of the version requested (the PHP parameter) has been changed/updated.
Thanks for the explanation of the mechanism.
We do this to notify users about new versions, especially when there are important bugs that have been fixed.
This is not helpful in a GNU distribution using a conservative-style release model (not sure if this is the correct term) like Debian does. Imagine Debian stable and oldstable users being reminded of their software being out of date on every upstream release. Of course, their software is out of date, as they use remmina from Debian (old)stable (not testing/unstable). They get those notifications but cannot do anything about it (except upgrading to Debian testing).
So, also from a usability point of view, those notification windows will be a disturbance to the users of Debian.
Libreoffice does something similar for instance and other software, in Debian,as well.
Really? Than this must be considered as a bug. Which other packages have you observed doing this?
I understand it may be quite annoying and we can add an opt-out option, would that be enough?
Nope. I'd vote for a build-time switch that disables that code. I am sorry. Another option could be a disabled-by-default (via build-time option) update notification feature. A new remmina user should not be bothered by update notification popups they won't be able to install (because their Debian version won't have that update).
Please consider that for a small project like Remmina is quite important to keep a channel opened with our users, otherwise we keep receiving and answering to the same issues again again, because usual people do not do the effort of searching through our bug tracking system.
I fully understand that. People running on old software tend to report old bugs upstream. Please point them to the distribution they use, if they do that. In other projects, I use issue reporting templates that always ask for upstream version, package version and distro + distroversion. To amend the mess a little.
We do not track people and the stats is a completely separated system, that isonly opt-in.
I am sorry, but this won't change the policy here. Thanks for not tracking your users. Much appreciated.
So, let's find a solution that makes everybody happy.
I hope, you are ok with the above and the strictness of the policy. light+love Mike -- DAS-NETZWERKTEAM c\o Technik- und Ökologiezentrum Eckernförde Mike Gabriel, Marienthaler Str. 17, 24340 Eckernförde mobile: +49 (1520) 1976 148 landline: +49 (4351) 850 8940 GnuPG Fingerprint: 9BFB AEE8 6C0A A5FF BF22 0782 9AF4 6B30 2577 1B31 mail: mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de, http://das-netzwerkteam.de
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