On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Donn wrote:
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 01:11:53 +0200 From: Donn <donn.ingle@...400...> To: Mike Hearn <mike@...869...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Fedora Core 3 is no more, Weeee!
It *can* be solved through politics and diplomacy. But will it? Who knows. Does Inkscape even have more Linux users than Windows users? I have no idea.
Would a poll on the website help? Download stats ... I suppose repos would mask the stats; who knows how many Linux users get Inkscape from their repos? Hmm, a poser.
Would it be ethical to build-in a "call home" poll.
Yes and No.
Once it was fully disclosed and users could easily opt out it would then at least be ethical but less useful.
Putting something like this in release builds would be a bad idea because as you (Donn) have seen distributions will keep these packages around for several years and certain users will likely leave them unchanged even longer.
Perhaps during first-run the user can yea/nay a vote back to your servers?
However the nightly builds are supposed to be all about testing and providing feedback so callback tools and frequent reminders to upgrade would not be at all unreasonable. (Again it would need to be made clear up front.)
Here is another thing that might be worth exploring: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/
I recall the bug isolation project providing special builds of the GNU Imange Manipulation program to help gather more detailed information, perhaps they could be persuaded to do the same for Inkscape.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com