User-Agent string, my patch and privacy concerns.

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Thu, 3 Apr 2008 11:34:13 +0200, Masklinn <masklinn at masklinn.net> wrote:
>On 2 Apr 2008, at 18:20 , Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> That's a reasonable idea.  I'm just worried if the current Mercurial
>> users will find it similar to `phoning home' and complain loudly.
>
> I don't think they will: pretty much every software that uses HTTP
> reports that kind of informations (e.g. Firefox' default User Agent
> string explicitly states that my OS is OS X 10.5, its Gecko's build
> number, and its own complete version number).
>
> The informations Eric proposes to add don't go beyond that, and I think
> making the UAS completely configurable the way you suggest  pretty much
> alleviates the issue for those who would care.

Agreed.  I'll try to wipe up a patch that implements what I suggested.
The defaults can be set either way, I guess.

>> Now, it's now the same as M$ programs phoning home and saying that you
>> have so and so versions of so and so software.  It's half-way there
>> though.
>
> Yes and no, it's the software reporting the platform configuration
> relevant to it in its UAS, seems pretty standard as far as HTTP  clients
> (especially browsers) are concerned. For example, Lynx reports  not only
> its own version but also the versions of libwww, SSL-MM and  OpenSSL it
> was built with, the default Curl UAS reports even more  (though there
> are people who care and don't like it, see
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=112555 ), etc...
>
> I doubt most people will care or mind.

Haha!

That's *precisely* the PR I had in mind when I wrote the original.  One
of my alter egos is keramida at FreeBSD.org, and I had seen this PR a
few days before writing that some users may be annoyed by reporting too
much.

It's fascinating that you would pick the same problem report in a
database of a few hundred thousands of posts.  I guess the world *is*
after all a very small place :)