Re: [epp-dev] Time to retire the UDC?

[Wayne Beaton <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Comments in line.

Wayne

On 05/21/2011 11:43 AM, Igor Fedorenko wrote:
> Don't get me wrong, I fully understand and appreciate your concerns. I
> mostly complain about timing. To me UDC was part of "public API"
> provided to the projects by the Foundation and taking this out after
> RC1 is rather unexpected.
This is splitting hairs, but the UDC does not expose any public API.
> Maybe m2e would be the first such example. When somebody complains
> about "my project does not work, m2e is broken" on the mailing list or
> in bugzilla, it is impossible to tell if this is a problem for large
> number of users or just a few (but very loud) individuals. So our plan
> was to use the stats as a way to encourage community to work on more
> popular plugins first and maybe even implement support for some of
> them ourselves. Our idea was that developers would be far more willing
> to invest their time in something they know would be used by many
> others as opposed to one-off things.
A compelling use case. Though I'm not sure how practical it is. I'll try
to take a look at the data from this perspective over the weekend.

<snip>
>> FWIW, I believe it would be inappropriate for an Eclipse project to
>> gather usage data. The key questions are: where is the data stored and
>> who is responsible for it?
>>
> Frankly, we assumed the Foundation already had this figured out and
> m2e would be able to piggy-back on your existing infrastructure and
> policies.
We do have it figured out and functioning in accordance with our privacy
policy. I have made the "org.eclipse" data available for several years
(which, admittedly, omits the error data); nobody has demonstrated any
significant value in the data. Again, I'll try to take a look at it from
the perspective described above.

The bottom line here is that managing the UDC is a net cost to the
Foundation and ties up scant resources. Is the time that webmaster and I
invest in UDC more valuable than, say, getting Gerrit up and running for
all Eclipse projects? Unfortunately, the value calculation that Ian and
I have done says "no".

Wayne