Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash reporting

Re:Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash repor... by me551ah on Monday July 05, 2021 @06:16PM (#27742314)

The reaction is completely overblown. As a software developer myself I know how important crash reports are to figure out which bugs are impacting the most number of users. If everyone moved to this version without telemetry, we would end up with a far buggier version of Audacity because the developer has no clue of what bugs of prioritize. Audacity runs on multiple OSs and with the huge amount of hardware devices available, it's impossible for the maintainer of an open source project to test them all. I really hope that this project doesn't catch up, for the sake of bug-free audacity.

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Re:Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash repor... by ploxiln on Monday July 05, 2021 @08:02PM (#27742983)

How did Audacity gain it's popularity over the past 15 years, without any of this stuff?

Did you use computers 15 years ago? Linux desktop and open source tools? Nothing had this crap back then, and some of it was pretty good. Audacity itself is an example!

Open source software is not a commercial product. You don't need to prioritize and optimize for engagement or market share or any such crap. Just fix what you want, fix what you can, interested capable users will contribute attempted fixes for their own problems and you incorporate them if they make sense to the project.

I don't think telemetry has ever resulted in good software, it just pushes everything towards being an iPad with one button on it. Only skilled tasteful developers make good software, and that was true long before telemetry existed.

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Re:Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash repor... by djur on Monday July 05, 2021 @08:20PM (#27743093)

Audacity does a lot of useful stuff and it's free + cross-platform, and that's a major source of its popularity. But it's always had usability and stability issues for as long as I've used it (and that's at least 15 years).

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Re:Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash repor... by veeti on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @12:25AM (#27744219)

Sorry to burst your bubble, but mainstream Linux distributions have been collecting crash reports for a looong time.

[1] https://errors.ubuntu.com/ [2] https://developer.fedoraproject.org/tools/abrt/about.html

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Re:Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash repor... by ploxiln on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @12:56AM (#27744371)

I'm aware, I use ubuntu, and my server provisioning scripts remove all the useless bloatware, abrt and apport and landscape etc etc, of which there seems to be a bit more each year. On my personal systems I use Arch linux and customize my kernel.

Actual fixes overwhelmingly come from individuals manually reporting weird lockups and backtraces, often taking the initiative to bisect the issue to a particular commit.

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Re:Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash repor... by jjulius on Monday July 05, 2021 @08:06PM (#27743022)

To strengthen your point, it's actually been out for 21 years. :)

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Re:Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash repor... by geofft on Monday July 05, 2021 @06:30PM (#27742411)

But if this project does catch on, it indicates that users prefer a pro-privacy Audacity to a bug-free Audacity. That might not be the decision you (or I) would prefer, but I think it's a legitimate decision for users to make and we ought to respect that.

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Re:Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash repor... by viraptor on Monday July 05, 2021 @07:51PM (#27742926)

It indicates bias in reporting too. There are a few people I know using Audacity and they have not heard of this whole issue (yet?) - and I really don't expect they will care if they do. So I expect we'll have some hardline pro-privacy users keeping this fork while a majority keeps doing their work using the original upstream.

Here we'll only hear the strong pro-privacy views because that's the news.

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