Re: [RFC PATCH v1] telemetry design overview (part 1)

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 11, 2018, 08:30 UTC
Message-ID: <20180611083058.GA1592@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20180611061441.GC28598@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Mon, Jun 11, 2018 at 02:14:41AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 12:00:57AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> 
> > I also have to look at this issue from the interests of what is best for
> > the FLOSS community and for users as a whole.  Adding in functionality
> > that sends off usage data from a command-line tool, especially one that
> > is as widely used as Git is, is not in the interests of users as a
> > whole, nor is it common practice in FLOSS tools.
> 
> I'm not sure if this last statement is true. For instance, many tools
> have crash-reporting functionality, and some contain more advanced
> telemetry. E.g.:
> 
>   https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry
> 
> Personally I do not like this sort of data collection at all, and never
> enable it. And I would be highly suspicious of any FLOSS tool that
> shipped with it enabled by default. But it seems like at least some
> projects _do_ find it useful, and enough people enable it to make it
> worth carrying as a feature.

Re-reading what I wrote, I really want to emphasize something so that it isn't missed. I think the important feature here is user consent, and that seems to be the line that projects like Mozilla use (default to off, and require explicit consent before sending anything off-host).

We don't have to use that line. I think "do not collect even locally" is a reasonable line, because even collecting has performance and storage management implications. And I don't think anybody is proposing to even collect local telemetry without the user turning it on.

The line under discussion seems to be "implement code to collect anything at all". That's a valid line, too, but IMHO it ends up blocking useful features (and I think we already violate it with things like GIT_TRACE!).

-Peff