I am very much in favor of this being an opt-in option at the end of the installer. I don't think we need to have this be more than a one time occurrence.
Chris On Sep 4, 2008, at 8:29 AM, Chris Meller wrote: > I was playing around with USVN (a web-based Subversion management > GUI), and one of the installer steps [1] was whether or not to check > for updates and submit server stats. > > I know we've talked previously about asking during install whether > or not we should check for updates (for paranoia reasons), but I'd > like to bring up discussion about adding a second option for > submitting stats. Often there are many things that projects have > trouble judging the availability of on the average host (versions, > extensions, etc.), and having some centralized collection mechanism > would greatly improve our ability to judge the extent we could > reliably anticipate such things. Ideally, I would also love to see > us publish these statistics in some manner so that the larger > community could benefit from our efforts. > > A few examples of things this could help with: > > - Our mbstring vs. iconv discussion largely centered around which > extension was more widely available > - A question came up just the other day on IRC involving a problem > with the value of $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']. No one really knew if > that was valid or not - it was set, but not to a value we'd have > predicted. The reliability of other _SERVER variables is also > suspect at times. > - Knowing which PHP versions are in use has a wealth of advantages > (duh) > - Database driver and translation usage could help us target > resources more accurately > > Some basic information about your environment could be bottled up > locally and submitted at the same time as update checks are > performed (or at any other interval, via cron - it really wouldn't > matter) and it could always be turned off in the options at any time > if you'd opted-in during install. For bonus points, I suppose we > could add the ability to turn on and off the individual data points > we were collecting if, for example, the admin didn't want us > collecting $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] from its users. > > We would need a clear and firm privacy policy, but we were going to > do that for updates anyway. Most of the data would be pretty > harmless, certainly nothing I would worry about, and could > potentially also be scrubbed before being sent (knowing simply that > SCRIPT_NAME is set but not what it contains is somewhat less useful, > but still helpful, for example). > > This is one of those things that could really turn out to be as > simple or as complex as we care to make it, I simply wanted to throw > out an idea and get some basic feedback on it. Opinions? > > [1] http://chrismeller.com/dump/1a0b5268efd464c19258455b2bea3cb8.png > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
