[Qgis-developer] QGIS update available plugin and/or ping back plugin

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

In a separate thread, Neal raises the point below. Moving it to a
separate thread here.

Nyal asks: "... On a semi-related theme, we really need a core "QGIS
update available" plugin. I suspect there's a ton of users still on
2.8.0/.1/<2.8 just due to not knowing there's a new version out. This
could also be really handy for tracking stats of users..."

@Nyall: we already have an menu item: Help/Check QGIS version
But I just checked, and in 2.8.3 it says that I should update to 2.10,
so I think that is more or less broken since we do LTR versions...

And we did have this ping back discussion earlier, resulting in "we
cannot do it because of the privacy issues".

Though I'm pretty privacy-minded, I am actually in favour of a ping back!

Given the following plan, does that guarantee enough privacy for people
who were against it earlier:

- during first creation of .qgis2 user folder (upon first installation)
we generate some uuid (based on currentime+somerandom)
- upon later startups QGIS fires a HTTP GET request to a webserver which
contains this UUID + the language + current version used
- this request is handled by a separate apache or nginx server which
does nothing more then logging this, and returning the (for that branch)
latest version. Which is checked for by QGIS
- by simple analysing the logs (grepping) we can have some info about
our user-base (number of installs given a period of time) and even a
live 'currently QGISsing'-guess :-)

Can privacy concerning people live with this plan?

As an argument to allowing these pingbacks, as we/I invest pretty much
time in localisation around QGIS, it would make me feel better if I know
that all this work is actually be used by some people :-)

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde