Den 06. juni 2017 15:10, skrev Guenter Milde:
On 2017-06-04, Cris Fuhrman wrote:
I totally agree. I mentioned this point in my first post in the other
thread about the preferences file. Many applications have a preference to
turn on or off usage data collection (it's often phrased "help improve this
application by contributing anonymous usage data").
Actually, if ever done by LyX, I strongly want this to be opt-in, not a
default.
Günter
Definitely an opt-in. We must be able to trust that we can use LyX for
confidential stuff.
Also, I do not want LyX to hang/delay because "some networking problem"
interferes with such communications. I have had enough such problems
when starting LyX, and LyX decides to open (or perhaps just stat() ) the
"Recent" files - but some of them are on a broken file server that cause
2min TCP timeouts. So I were sometimes forced to wait (or at least do
some forced umounts) before I could use even a local file, because LyX
unnecessarily waited on a "recent file". :-/ It has been a while
since I saw that problem - I believe they upgraded our troubled server.
One can hope LyX has gotten better too.
Programmers should always bear in mind that anything that uses the
network - or even the file system (which may be partially networked) -
may fail or come with a rather long delay. Users are not "always
online", and remote servers can be badly mismanaged. So don't touch the
network or the file system unless it is necessary. In the case of
"recent files", no fs access is needed until the user try to open one of
them. Accessing those files earlier may have been a good idea, as in
"lets not display filenames that aren't actually there", but then it
turns out that checking can be too expensive. When it comes to google
analytics - some people try to firewall it because they don't want their
web usage tracked so much.
Helge Hafting
