[asterisk-dev] Asterisk Beacon Module Proposal

Leif Madsen leif.madsen at avoxi.com
Mon Jun 8 08:57:56 CDT 2015


On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 9:35 AM, Russell Bryant <russell at russellbryant.net>
wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 8:05 PM, Matthew Jordan <mjordan at digium.com> wrote:
>
>> Personally, I'd like some way to present any user of Asterisk with a
>>
> one-time only, non-annoying "please help the project and opt in"
>> question, and then move on forever. Unfortunately, I don't have a good
>> idea on making this suggestion work. If the only way to opt in is to
>> provide a .conf file and set "enable = true", then I can't see
>> anywhere near sufficient numbers of people being aware of the
>> configuration choice, much less making the choice to enable it, to
>> justify the creation of the module itself.
>>
>> If someone has a good proposal on making the suggestion work, then I'd
>> love to entertain it further.
>>
>
> I feel that "opt-out" is fundamentally wrong from a privacy perspective.
> Further, I think the potential backlash and resulting damage to the project
> is pretty severe.
>
> I also don't think "opt-in is hard" is an acceptable reason not to do it.
> If it's too hard to make an opt-in solution useful, then maybe it shouldn't
> be done at all.  This sort of thing really doesn't seem very common, and
> this is probably a big reason why.
>
> One alternative would be to issue periodic user surveys that are promoted
> on the mailing lists, twitter, etc.  I don't think you'll ever get a
> reliable "absolute numbers" measure.  A survey could still produce useful
> relative numbers and help identify some trends over time.
>

First, I think the idea of a quarterly survey makes a lot of sense. You
would probably get a bunch of useful information in one go rather than a
slow trickle of information. You could also make this something people do
on the website when downloading Asterisk from there.

Other projects I've seen this on (Bower for example), do it during the
installation process. The way I would picture this working with the
Makefile is that you provide a prompt with a Y/N selection asking if you
want to opt-in. If someone wants to automate this process, provide a flag
option that allows them to --opt-in or --opt-out in order to provide a
selection while also skipping human input. Then you can "override" that
compiled in default with the below suggestion.

Around the configuration file approach (which I think is also useful for
those wanting to override the default compile time option, which will be
selected during SOME sort of compile time process, whether that be on the
machine, or during the package creation process), I would expect it to be a
file provided via the 'make samples' option.

Then on the console when you connect, you could provide output that looks
similar to the following:

$ asterisk -r
Asterisk 1.8.11-cert9, Copyright (C) 1999 - 2012 Digium, Inc. and others.
Created by Mark Spencer <markster at digium.com>
Asterisk comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; type 'core show warranty' for
details.
This is free software, with components licensed under the GNU General Public
License version 2 and other licenses; you are welcome to redistribute it
under
certain conditions. Type 'core show license' for details.
=========================================================================
Connected to Asterisk 1.8.11-cert9 currently running on localhost (pid =
4364)
Verbosity is at least 5
Asterisk Beacon: Enabled (see core show help beacon)
*CLI>

With a separate configuration file and module, you could then provide the
following option:

beacon set opt in
beacon set opt out

This would then write out to the configuration beacon.conf with enabled=yes
or no and reload the module.

Thanks,
Leif.
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