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

[Nyall Dawson]

On 3 August 2015 at 18:23, Richard Duivenvoorde <rdmailings at duif.net> wrote:
> 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..."

s/\bN[ye]al{0,2}\b/Nyall/g ;)


> @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...

That's an issue, plus I don't think a passive check like this is
in-your-face enough for most users.

>
> 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 :-)

I'd also add platform details to that - just broad details like
operating system/linux distro, version and 32 or 64 bit. These stats
would be very useful to have.

>
> Can privacy concerning people live with this plan?

+1 from me!

Nyall