Hi, Kristian! On Mar 09, Kristian Nielsen wrote:
As most MariaDB users should know, the feedback is totally anonymous and no private or sensitive information is being sent.
Any comments, suggestions or recommendations?
I think it is a bad idea. Please do not do it.
"Phone-home" is a misfeature in any product, and even more so in system software like a database.
Agree. I don't like it myself. Still between that and random development decisions driven by the marketing department, I just might prefer phone-home.
And besides, the information is much less useful than you think, because of unknown, but probably extreme, data skew. In fact, it will probably be more harmful than useful because people will use bad data to justify bad decisions.
Right, but there are three approaches to this. First, try to get more reports, in the hope that it'll be a representative sample. That's what we're discussing this email thread. Second, take the known skew into account when analyzing the data. For example, see the OS stats chart (http://mariadb.org/feedback_plugin/stats/os/) - it doesn't mean that 96.3% of MariaDB installations are on Windows, it means that we have disproportionally more reports from Windows. And third, use numbers where the skew doesn't matter. For example, total number of installations.
Experience supports this point of view with our download numbers. They do not include apt-get / yum / etc. installations, which judging from IRC conversations are the majority. Yet people continuely refer to them as though they mean anything, just because they are there.
Of course they mean something. They show, literally, how many times mariadb was downloaded from downloads.mariadb.org. As such, they show that mariadb was downloaded (from all sources) *at least* that many times. Also, one can *reasonably assume* that the number of downloads from all other sources follows the grows of downloads from mariadb.org (unless the number of "other sources" changes). These numbers mean a lot. They just don't mean the total number of all mariadb installation (from all sources). Which is pretty obvious :) Regards, Sergei