I see! Well, that's two people vehemently opposed so far. :) Interesting.
Count me as "vehemently opposed" as well. Thank you.
For comparison, it's far from unprecedented for programs to send statistical information to their developers when they check for updates.
Is that reason enough to do it as well?
The purpose for collecting this data is obvious: it allows the developers to learn what kinds of machines and OS versions their users are using, which can help the developers decide where to focus their resources.
Is there somebody who decides, or who is even entitled to decide, how the resources of port developers are being focused? I doubt it. In practice, it seems to me that Portfiles are being developed and updated by people who actually use the software, not by some abstract pool of developers who can be told to do this or that at the whim of some statistics. IOW, although we probably all know that a lot of people use perl, the Portfile for perl5.8 is still owned by nomaintainer. And that's a Good Thing. ;) I think your hypothesis that those statistics are somehow "needed" requires more support. As it stands, it is not well defended. Be that as it may, my real argument is that you are not entitled to collect this kind of statistics, and certainly not to "turn it on by default because we wouldn't get enough people to allow us to do it otherwise". I am firmly convinced that it's absolutely none of your business what software I use or don't use. And if I recommend MacPorts to a friend, or install it for him, I don't want to do it knowing that Ryan Schmidt Design is going to get detailed reports on what that person decides to do with MacPorts. I want to be able to continue to support MacPorts. I'm strictly opposed to collecting more and more data about your users. Please don't do this. If you feel you absolutely need to do it, create an optional package that collects your statistics for you, so that people who think you should get it can install and activate it for you. Explicitly, manually, consciously agreeing to having their data collected. Regards, Marc