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
