[Monotone-devel] Re: [RFC] M.T. phone home

[Wim Oudshoorn]

My general take on this:

* I don't mind so much information is gathered, but 
  I would appreciate being able to see exactly what is sent

* Branch names are sensitive because we branch
  per feature / bug fix with the bug identifier in the branch name

* Directory/file names are sensitve for more or less the same reason

Now let me elaborate why this is sensitive, if a client of hours
could put in google his bug identifier and the google search would
show information regarding monotone activity of us related to this bug,
that is BAD.   (Especially because the can use that foothold
to gather information about other bugs that are worked or NOT worked on).
I don't mind necesarily so much if monotone developers
knows our monotone usage.  
Of course the same happens with file/directory names.  It isn't to 
hard to guess a directory/file name.  And if this allows someone
to discover our commit patterns related to files/directories is not something
I feel comfortable with.

In the same vein:

* Name of keys, server, DB etc.  Sensitive.

If everything is anonymous, and it is hard to link the information
back to a project I do not mind so much.   I am not really 
afraid of someone spending weeks to figure out if he can discover 
our usage of monotone by looking through lots of anonymous and obfuscated
names.


On the implementation/usage part.  I have a few questions/remark:

1 - The location of storing this data needs to be choosen carefully,
    because we run a monotone server where we do not use HOME, but
    specify the config file on the command line.
    (We are using an older version, I don't know how the new key storage
     works yet.)

2 - The server, I never run any command on it by hand.  So I will never
    see a request to phone home.  (Might be that you are not interested
    in this data at all.)

3 - I run monotone for the most part through my emacs front end.  
    I would not like it to spring me a question when I run it that way,
    because it would confuse emacs.  
   
4 - And, as you of course realize, but let me state the obvious,
    failure to send should not interfere with monotone usage.

There is undoubtedly much more, but this is it for now.  

Wim Oudshoorn