thoughts on LWN "how many Fedora users are there"

[Kam Leo]

On 10/14/06, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>

Is Red Hat requesting the number of users information because Fedora
now uses yum and yum does not require/provide the single point of
contact up2date provided?