On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 10:50 AM Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Tue, Jan 08, 2019 at 04:22:39PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > The additional information could be
> > 10.5.124.209 - - [31/Dec/2018:09:07:21 +0000] "GET
> >
/metalink?repo=fedora-28&arch=x86_64&uuid=<blah>&edition=<blah>
> > HTTP/1.1" 200 62200 "-" "dnf/2.7.5"
> If all you want to do is count, then it should be entirely sufficient
> to do it like this:
> GET
/metalink?repo=fedora-28&arch=x86_64&edition=<blah>&countme=1 HTTP/1.1
> the first time within each one-week window and a simple
> GET /metalink?repo=fedora-28&arch=x86_64&edition=<blah> HTTP/1.1
> all other times.
> Then, sum up how many "countme=1" GET requests we get per week, and
> you have a good count, without tracking individual clients, without
> inventing new uuids¹.
I do like this idea!
And, if there's not an associated UUID, it's more comfortable to do
"countme=2" the second week and onward -- this would make it easy to
distinguish systems which are short-lived. (Or "countme=new" and
"countme=ongoing" or something?)
Hmmmm. How comfortable would people be with reporting an incrementing count
*every* week (again, without a UUID attached)? That'd give a new axis into
the data which I can imagine being quite useful.
I like this idea and I think it's generally less likely to set off
alarm bells about privacy. I do think we probably want to avoid an
*incrementing* count, though to avoid questions around using
time-of-install as a vector into identifying the owner. So the
"new-vs-ongoing" differentiator seems reasonable to me. I *would*
suggest that we probably want to have it send "countme=new" every time
it tries to reach the mirrorlink until the first time it gets a proper
response. After that, sending "countme=ongoing" once a week would be
good additional information.