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An "opt-in component" policy idea

From: Dennis Clarke <dclarke_at_blastwave.org>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2018 08:51:55 -0400

This will be unpopular and may burst into flames upon arrival but here
goes. From 2 Jul 2018 on this maillist there was an idea proposed by
Daniel Stenberg to make "HTTP/0.9" an opt in supported feature which I
assume means we have to select it at compile time. Seems like a great
idea however I suggested that the entire project just make a policy
where low usage features be turned into "opt-in" flags and possibly this
would really reduce the size of the actual day to day run time. However
how does one determine what is below the low water mark for usage? The
data from the "annual survey" may not really reflect what is happening
in the wild. As Daniel says :

     - the user survey is unreliable as the ultimate "truth" since it
       is only a small subset of users filling it out

Also :

     - I still want to explain my thinking and I hope someone will tell
       me if I forgot something important that makes my plan break or
       just be bad. If nobody says anything, that means nobody objects
       or found a serious problem with the plan (that they can't live
       with).

However the pièce de résistance for me was this :

     - sometimes a "single user" of a feature uses libcurl in an
       application used by a billion humans. Such use cases might
       get some extra attention and sympathy.

OKay .. so I went away, made coffee, sat and thought of a really bad
idea. This one has a real smell to it. Therefore I apologize in
advance and have my flame suit ready.

Here goes :

     What if there existed an "opt-in" feature which would enable
     curl/libcurl to send a usage status message to some end point
     collection server? A trivial message, perhaps just a single
     udp packet with some 128bit binary of flags to indicate that
     some feature is enabled or not. It could be fired out to an
     SSL/TLS port 443 listener once a month perhaps on some random
     day of the month to avoid congestion.

OKay, so there, I said it. A stats collector feature which would allow
the annual survey data to have a bit more meat to it. Ugly, I know.

Dennis Clarke
ps: flame suit is ready
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Received on 2018-07-06