User-Agent string, my patch and privacy concerns.

[Eric M. Hopper]

On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 18:35 +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> On Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:51:22 -0700, "Eric M. Hopper" <hopper at omnifarious.org> wrote:
>   [web]
>   user_agent_format = {myprotocol}
>   user_agent_format = {myprotocol} ({pythonversion}; {hgversion}; ${osversion})
> 
> Then we can use the templater to expand the keywords shown above, or other
> things that may be considered useful in a User-Agent header.
> 
> IMHO, the default should be to keep the current behavior.  Allowing extra info
> would be possible, but not forced `unexpectedly' upon existing users :-)

That's a really interesting proposal.  The thing is, if the default is
to keep the current behavior then some things that might be really nice,
like being able to know approximately how many people who pull stuff are
using Windows, an old version of Python or an old version of Mercurial.

I've often wondered, for example, how important Python 2.3 support
really is.  If a maintainer is thinking of moving to a version of
Mercurial that may do things an older version won't understand fully, it
would be nice to know how much of an impact that's going to have
independent of who complains the loudest.

If the extra information isn't there by default then none of those
statistics can be collected because hardly anybody will ever turn it on.
In fact, I think for the most part if no extra information is there by
default that the feature is almost completely pointless to implement at
all.

Perhaps some compromise like having a suggest default global hgrc that
has extended information would be reasonable.

Hmmm,
-- 
A word is nothing more or less than the series of historical
connotations given to it. That's HOW we derive meaning, and to claim
that there is an arbitrary meaning of words above and beyond the way
people use them is a blatant misunderstanding of the nature of language.
-- Anonymous blogger
-- Eric Hopper (hopper at omnifarious.org http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper)--
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