GSoC 2019 [Collect build statistics]

[Craig Treleaven]

> On Mar 24, 2019, at 5:57 PM, Fred Wright <fw at fwright.net> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 24 Mar 2019, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>> On Sat, 23 Mar 2019 at 17:49, Craig Treleaven wrote:
>>> 
>>> I see no reason to report inactive ports.
>> 
>> Neither do I. I would remove those as I already mentioned in an earlier email.
> 
> But in the spirit of lossless collection, those should be included and flagged as inactive, so that what to do with them can be decided later.
> 
> There are different reasons for inactive ports.  Sometimes they're just leftovers from upgrades without -u.  But sometimes the user is intentionally keeping inactive ports, to permit switching fairly quickly via activate/deactivate, either to keep multiple variants or to keep conflicting ports.
> 
Two reasons we shouldn’t collect details of inactive ports:

1) It needlessly increases the volume of data transmitted and processed.  In my case, I have nearly 7 times as many inactive ports as active.  If we hope to get thousands of users participating, that would waste resources for users and the project.

2) We should only collect data from users that we need.  No one has said how details of inactive ports might be useful.  If it isn’t useful, how can we justify to users that we need to collect it?

Craig