When I said "feel free to phone home the agreed information" I was thinking (but I neglected saying it explicitly) that as part of this protocol there would be a standard, pre-agreed set of information that may be sent (Perl and module version and platform are good candidates). I think it would be even better if a relatively neutral and central place like search.cpan.org (or something like that) collected all the statistics, instead of contacting the author directly. This way some people might be more likely to trust sending the information without being asked, and people would also be able to compare statistics for different modules and authors. If you are not comfortable with allowing everything to phone home (or rather the CPAN site) automatically, you are still free to leave the variable in the "ask" state.

I would also suggest developing a standard CPAN module for doing the phoning instead of each author rolling their own. That would make it easier to use, have more flexibility for configuring it to use proxies or whatever is needed, and again it might make some people more likely to trust it.

I've mentioned trust several times. That is the central problem here, but just remember that whenever you install any program without reading and understanding the entire source code first, you are implicitly trusting the author (hey, if you didn't trust the author you would have written the code yourself!). Maybe there are some other modules that phone home without asking and no one has noticed. It would be good to have a standard way for authors that want to play nice to do this in an acceptable way.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Gathering module usage statistics - a compromise solution? by itub
in thread Gathering module usage statistics by Juerd

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