BSDstats Statistics for Sept, 2007 ... 12 769 Hosts Reported In

[Miguel Lopes Santos Ramos]

> From: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy at freebsd.org>
[...]
> Percentage Change in September from August:
>
>            Overall           +12.8%
[...]
>            FreeBSD           - 7.4%  (5008 hosts)

Numbers have gone down as to what FreeBSD is concerned.
I think it's because the bsdstats script is becoming a bit of a pain...
- The script keeps being changed and updated...
- The script now wants to run on startup, which is a pain. Why? What was wrong
with monthly reports? Why the haste? In my case it runs before an HTTP proxy is
up and running... I had to disable it. Why on earth enabled by default? That's
not what most ports do... The FreeBSD user is usually expected to manually
enable the port after installing it.
- Only now I realised that it is still reporting monthly... Otherwise it would
have been deactivated for my machine.

While a lot of us understands the interest of this, and even takes the time to
take a look at how it's done, we also don't have the time to keep peting it
every time it changes behaviour. The first reaction might be uninstall the port.

Also, I think the enabled by default thing is a very bad idea. Consider when
you're deploying a BSD in an enterprise environment; not everybody might
understand imediatly that it would be beneficial to have that thing reporting
automatically and by default...

Greetings,

Miguel