Should commercial actors ship telemetry in nixpkgs?

polygon · February 14, 2025, 11:02am

For this software in particular, disabling telemetry is very much a “trust me” thing anyways.

Since the AI does run on a server, whether or not you have telemetry enabled, your request needs to go there to be processed. All that DO_NOT_TRACK is doing is to append a URL parameter disable_telemetry with the selected value.

github.com

cachix/devenv/blob/1235cd13f47df6ad19c8a183c6eabc1facb7c399/devenv/src/devenv.rs#L214


      
          pub async fn generate(
              &mut self,
              description: Option<String>,
              host: &str,
              exclude: Vec<PathBuf>,
              disable_telemetry: bool,
          ) -> Result<()> {
              let client = reqwest::Client::new();
              let mut request = client
                  .post(host)
                  .query(&[("disable_telemetry", disable_telemetry)])
                  .header(reqwest::header::USER_AGENT, crate_version!());
          
              let (asyncwriter, asyncreader) = tokio::io::duplex(256 * 1024);
              let streamreader = tokio_util::io::ReaderStream::new(asyncreader);
          
              let (body_sender, body) = match description {
                  Some(desc) => {
                      request = request.query(&[("q", desc)]);
                      (None, None)
                  }

Can have one opinion or another on the defaults being set. But actually having this option to disable telemetry is probably better than 99.9% of the other AI tools out there. So please consider this before this gets blown out of proportion. If this was just being done and the option to disable telemetry was never offered, I am 99% certain no one would have batted an eye.