Popularity Contest

[Jim Cheetham]

It might not be totally obvious, but because this is Open Source you 
are all able to retrieve the source code for the popularity-contest, 
and see what it actually does (answer: exactly what it says on the 
label). If a closed-source program was found, it would be difficult to 
be sure what it actually does, even if the original purpose was 
acceptable, you'd never be sure it wasn't doing something else (until 
someone reverse-engineers it). I'd take the case of the recent Acrobat 
Reader software as an example there.

However, although I don't have any problems with the software myself, I 
do appreciate Ed's perspective - there probably should be an explicit 
question presented to the user somewhere before information is sent 
back (there's possibly nothing wrong in collating the results on the 
machine, I don't know if the popcon people can collate a large lump of 
historical data).

It doesn't make much sense to ask this at install or base-config time, 
because these need to be streamlined and simple. However, it could be 
sitting under a configuration menu somewhere, waiting to be discovered 
... or perhaps it emails the owner periodically (monthly?), asking for 
permission to continue (and including instructions on how to 
enable/disable it, a bit like logcheck).

-jim

On Apr 3, 2005, at 6:36 PM, Shawn Christopher wrote:
> I agree with a few statements. Had Microsoft done this (and who says
> they don't) then people would be throwing a fit.
> Ed Fletcher wrote:
>> I was looking for something else in Synaptic and came across
>> popularity-contest.  It was installed, so I got curious and had a look
>> at it.  It turns out that it's run by cron.weekly and lists all the
>> packages on your system, sorts them by how recently they've been
>> accessed and emails the results to survey at popcon.debian.org