Hi,

I agree with Kristian.  Given the way it works, the statistics are really meaningless and I feel you shouldn't drive important choices based on bad statistics.  I personally would suggest displaying a link to a feedback/survey form with web downloads and display a message after rpm/deb installation that says something like "please visit http://blah/blah/blah/survey to tell us more about the features you use and help direct the future development of MariaDB".  This has an added bonus: not all users know about all features, and a list/survey of the important and interesting ones could get more users to use them.

Just my $.02

--Justin

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 1:19 AM, Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@knielsen-hq.org> wrote:
Michael Widenius <monty@askmonty.org> writes:

> for the alpha so I suggested Sergei today that we should enable it for
> the beta period of MariaDB 10.0

(10.*1* beta, I guess?)

> 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.

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.

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.

 - Kristian.

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