maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Ian!

On Mar 11, Ian Gilfillan wrote:
> I understand that the statistics would have some meaning, and
> understand that there's no actual data being sent, etc.
> 
> However, enabling the feedback plugin by default IS going to create a
> whole lot of negative publicity for MariaDB. Is the limited data the
> feedback plugin provides worthwhile? Look at the similar situation
> with Ubuntu/Canonical. No matter how much they argued there was no
> real risk, they suffered a huge amount of negative publicity and
> eventually reversed the decision.

Yes. This is my worry too. That's why Monty has sent this email,
that's why it's planned to be enabled only for beta.

But asking people to "please enable the feedback plugin" just doesn't
work. It seems that most of our users don't care about it at all - I
mean, they don't care whether it's enabled or not, and don't care to do
anything.  That is, if the plugin is disabled - it'll stay disabled,
that's what is happening on Linux. If it's enabled - it'll stay enabled,
that's what is happening on Windows (MariaDB Windows installer has a
special dialog about it with a checkbox that's enabled by default, if
I'm not mistaken).

> Why go through this pain? Rather use this as an opportunity to create
> a thorough survey (which can provide far more detailed and useful
> information than the plugin running on a beta version) and engage
> constructively with the community. The survey has other benefits too,
> as pointed out elsewhere in the thread - raising awareness of
> lesser-known features, and just spreading the survey will be marketing
> for MariaDB.

Yes, survey is a good idea and I agree that we should do it.

> And by all means, give people an option to enable the plugin on 
> installation, as long as it defaults to off.

Okay, I'll see how we could pop up a dialog box during installation
to give users an option to enable or disable the plugin. With the plugin
being automatically disabled in non-interactive installations.

Regards,
Sergei