thoughts on LWN "how many Fedora users are there"

[Rahul Sundaram]

Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-13 at 21:32 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: 
>> If you want to not even let the project collect anonymous hits you just 
>> have to use a local mirror.
> 
> And where would *that* get its files from?
>

This is a pedantic argument.  The central mirror list has certain 
bandwidth requirements to be met before it is included. There are many 
many mirrors out there which are public but dont meet the bandwidth 
requirements and hence wont be included or counted as hits in our list. 
Moreover if you dont use the central mirror list and instead pick one 
specifically which is not the main mirror, you wont be counted by us.

Lets suppose that you did pick from one of the mirrors included in our 
list, you rsync and hit the mirror once and you can setup a local mirror 
that distributes to any number of local systems without hitting the main 
mirrors at all.

Since I havent seen anyone express concerns over us collecting metrics 
from anonymous hit logs that would be what we would be doing post FC6 
release.  Maybe on FC7, we can have a opt in mechanism to collect more 
stats. Having a better idea on how many users we have would be a good 
thing and what we have been wanting to do for quite sometime.

Rahul