[petsc-dev] I hate nagupgrade

[Matthew Knepley]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 2:21 PM, Karl Rupp <rupp at iue.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>  There is a difference between a library and an end-user application.
>> Having "updaters" for end-user applications seems to be the status quo
>> on Windows and to a lesser extent on Macs, but is resented on Linux.
>> Having a library do these checks is not okay anywhere.
>>
>
> I remember a session at the Google Summer of Code where some guy from one
> of the open source wikis shared his experiences with having embedded a
> 'counter pixel' in a release. In short, his lesson learned was that any
> kind of "phoning home" is an absolute no-go unless made *very* clear to the
> users (plus opt-out). This was pre-Snowden, so many people are now much
> more sensible with respect to these matters...
>

I am all for a configure opt-out, and noting it in every piece of
documentation. My impression of the level
of sophistication of most users is that we will see few opt-outs.

   Matt


> Best regards,
> Karli
>

-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20141111/221fb8cd/attachment.html>