Track who installed what ports on what OS and on what

[Marc André Selig]

> I see! Well, that's two people vehemently opposed so far. :)
> Interesting.

Count me as "vehemently opposed" as well.  Thank you.


> For comparison, it's far from unprecedented for programs to send
> statistical information to their developers when they check for
> updates.

Is that reason enough to do it as well?

> The purpose for collecting this data is obvious: it allows the
> developers to learn what kinds of machines and OS versions their
> users are using, which can help the developers decide where to focus
> their resources.

Is there somebody who decides, or who is even entitled to decide, how
the resources of port developers are being focused?  I doubt it.

In practice, it seems to me that Portfiles are being developed and
updated by people who actually use the software, not by some abstract
pool of developers who can be told to do this or that at the whim of
some statistics.  IOW, although we probably all know that a lot of
people use perl, the Portfile for perl5.8 is still owned by
nomaintainer.  And that's a Good Thing. ;)

I think your hypothesis that those statistics are somehow "needed"
requires more support.  As it stands, it is not well defended.


Be that as it may, my real argument is that you are not entitled to
collect this kind of statistics, and certainly not to "turn it on by
default because we wouldn't get enough people to allow us to do it
otherwise".  I am firmly convinced that it's absolutely none of your
business what software I use or don't use.  And if I recommend
MacPorts to a friend, or install it for him, I don't want to do it
knowing that Ryan Schmidt Design is going to get detailed reports on
what that person decides to do with MacPorts.  I want to be able to
continue to support MacPorts.


I'm strictly opposed to collecting more and more data about your
users.  Please don't do this.  If you feel you absolutely need to do
it, create an optional package that collects your statistics for you,
so that people who think you should get it can install and activate it
for you.  Explicitly, manually, consciously agreeing to having their
data collected.

Regards,
Marc