Re: Future of armv7

On Wed, 19 Nov 2025 12:53:33 -0500
John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On 11/17/25 12:57, Vadim Goncharov wrote:
> > On Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:08:29 -0500
> > John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> >   
> >> On 11/15/25 14:14, void wrote:  
> >>> On Sat, Nov 15, 2025 at 11:44:42AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> >>>      
> >>>> Community surveys, show of hands at conferences, mailing list traffic
> >>>> and armv7 package downloads (this is second hand).  
> >>>
> >>> Hmm. OK. But you'd never have counted my usage for example, and I
> >>> use 3x rpi2b's.
> >>>
> >>> I've never seen a survey about this and I've never attended a
> >>> conference. Much of the time if there's an issue I'd
> >>> search first before posting on freebsd-arm@.
> >>> I think it's reasonable to assume I'm not alone in this.  
> >>
> >> There is an annual user survey broadcast to announce@, etc.  Please
> >> do fill it out the next time it is offered.  The last survey was posted
> >> in April of 2025, so I expect the next one to be around the same
> >> timeframe in 2026.  
> >   
> > Many FreeBSD users are not subscribed and do not fill surveys. Seems that
> > it should be some more aggressive stats gathering, e.g. enabled by default
> > periodic scripts transmitting anonimized usage (this could be done even via
> > things like modifying URL for pkg's vuln.xml fetching), questions in the
> > installer, and/or other things.  
> 
> No, our users generally do not want boxes to call back "home", certainly not
> by default. 

This should be re-checked. For example via survey :)

> We do already have some stats on which package files are
> downloaded.

As discussion shows, this is not reliable at all. URLs in periodic have at
least somewhat more reliable.

-- 
WBR, @nuclight