alt Hacker NewsGiven the telemetry, how did uv ever get approved/adopted by the open source community to begin with, or did it creep in? Why isn't it currently burning in a fire?
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I don't think it is too bad, the telemetry it sends is quite rudimentary. However, would have been a good move from astral-sh to be open and explicit about it, and allow turning it off.
> These things include your OS, py version, CPU architecture, Linux distro, whether you're in CI. All baked into the User-Agent header via something called "linehaul". We ripped that out. Now it just sends fyn/0.10.13. That's it.
I imagine it's just that the User-Agent is something that we've grown accustomed to passing information in. I am fairly biased since I'd always opt-in even to popcon. I think it's useful to have such usage information.
It was really really good.
Because not everyone has a knee-jerk emotional reaction to a word when that word can mean something benign aside from its typical FUD connotation.
Telemetry isn't bad in OSS per se. Without it, it's hard to say how an app is used and how to develop it in the future.
The telemetry they removed here isn't unique to uv, and it's not being sent back to Astral. Here's the equivalent code in pip itself: https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/59555f49a0916c6459755d7686a...
It's providing platform information to PyPI to help track which operating systems and platforms are being used by different packages.
The result is useful graphs like these: https://pypistats.org/packages/sqlite-utils and https://pepy.tech/projects/sqlite-utils?timeRange=threeMonth...
The field that guesses if something is running in a CI environment is particularly useful, because it helps package authors tell if their package is genuinely popular or if it's just being installed in CI thousands of times a day by one heavy user who doesn't cache their requirements.
Honestly, stripping this data and then implying that it was collected by Astral/OpenAI in a creepy way is a bad look for this new fork. They should at least clarify in their documentation what the "telemetry" does so as not to make people think Astral were acting in a negative way.
Personally I think stripping the telemetry damages the Python community's ability to understand the demographics of package consumption while not having any meaningful impact on end-user privacy at all.
Here's the original issue against uv, where the feature was requested by a PyPI volunteer: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/1958
Update: I filed an issue against fyn suggesting they improve their documentation of this: https://github.com/duriantaco/fyn/issues/1