So there's another app-analytics controversy in opensource, this time regarding Go Lang? (Yes I shared some pro-advocacy blogposts this morning)
I do agree: Ideally we won't have any analytics in free software.
But these controversies will keep springing up because this is how proprietary devs are used to making decisions, so whenever the next one moves over to opensource we'll go through this rigamarole yet again.
So I think its important to ask: What compromise is reasonable? Go gets close.
Not familiar with this particular brouhaha, but I think opt-in analytics with example reports are the way to go.
I thought the outcry over Audacity was hilarious*, given that even Debian has an (optional) package called popularity-contest that reports on what packages people have installed.
*The part where they were going to use GOOG (iirc) for the analytics was not funny, though. Poor choice. But it was still voluntary.
@RL_Dane I'm not a Go programmer personally, but here's the blogposts:
http://research.swtch.com/telemetry-intro
http://research.swtch.com/telemetry-design
http://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses
Couldn't follow all of it, but it was fun to skim.
I think they make some good points. The need for telemetry in a *language* is bizarre, but an understandable consequence of the shift away from stable software and languages to a constantly shifting platform.
I for one, kinda miss stability. I don't mean that things are always crashing, but rather that things are changing so quickly.
...
@RL_Dane @alcinnz as long as old versions of all involved software remain available, you can keep your stability by running those. And in open source it's far more likely that older versions will be available.
In my experience the big trouble starts when people want to mix and match new and old. Everything is either explicitly or implicitly designed for the environment that exists at the time it was created, and we cannot predict the future.
Yeah. In this case, it would probably work fine on something like Debian where versions are held for a couple years at a time.
But on a rolling release distro, things not maintained tend to break.
This is absolutely not ideal.
I'd deal with balooning exeutables to get everything statically linked, but that then comes with security problems.