BSDStats - What is involved ... ?

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2006, Ceri Davies wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 11:36:12PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>>
>> In getting this into the base system itself?  Opt-in, default turned off,
>> of course, but maybe as an option in sysinstall to be enabled easily?
>
> Has it stabilised now?  I remember that there were some reasonably
> major changes made initially, and obviously once it hits the base then
> you're stuck with keeping the server end backward compatible for ever :)

The only major change(s) that were made since its inception that affected 
client-server communications was implementing the request-authenticate 
challenge system, and reducing the number of 'fetch requests' needed in 
reporting from 'one per device' to 'one for all devices' ... there were 
several changes made at the beginning that were done in such a way that 
older clients would still be able to talk, but remove storing of the 
IP/hostname was too big a change to allow pre-v3.x clients to talk to the 
server ...

The only other addition that I've had suggested was having it report 
/var/db/pkg (installed packages), but if/when that is added, it will be 
like the devices section, where its a *totally* seperate opt-in feature 
... the critical information that we were hoping to pull together was what 
is in the base system (release, arch and country) ...

Now, as Peter Jeremy pointed out, the only other change forthcoming as far 
as communications are concerned is *if* we can figure out clean way of 
dealing with a) authenticated proxies and b) non-Internet connected hosts 
... but, for a), that won't involve any changes in client-server accesses, 
and b) well, since I've no ideas being email for getting around that, 
might involve adding an 'email vs fetch' switch, and writing a script on 
the backend to accept/process the emails ... but, neither of those will 
'break older clients', only add functionality ... so, yes, I consider it 
to be 'stabilized' ...