Re: Should the default value of url-user-agent include a version number? What about the specific case of package.el?

[Sebastian Wiesner]

Am 24.03.2016 um 21:36 schrieb Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>:
> 
>>>> (Stefan, for example, your emails are tagged with "Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13)
>>>> Emacs/25.1.50 (gnu/linux)").  Has there been complaints about Gnus
>>>> doing that?
>>> I never liked it, but admittedly, I never complained about it.
>> May I ask why you do not like this behaviour? What stands against it?
> 
> That's just a leak of private information.

I must admit that I find it hard to agree.  I do not see how the OS, or the 
Emacs version, or 
the combination of both could be used to identify you as a person.  But if the 
can't, why
would you consider this information private?  And even if it could, doesn't it 
pale beside
the information that is necessarily send to the archive (e.g. your IP, a 
partial list of
the packages you're using, etc.)?

I think that our desire as package maintainers to learn how and where their 
packages are
used is legitimate.  It helps us to direct our efforts and our time to those 
enviroments
that matter and to make informed choices about what degree of backwards 
compatibility we
should offer.  In the absence of any concrete risk, I tend to value our desire 
higher 
than the interest of users to keep data private that can only be used for 
anonymous usage 
statistics.

Now, I understand that I'm biased, and that your priorities may be 
fundamentally different
from mine.  But I believe that the availability of some halfway solid 
statistics would
improve our ability to make informed decisions about our packages.