[antlr-interest] v3 pre-release usage data and stat collection

[Loring Craymer]

Ter--

Like others, I'm uncomfortable about spyware of any sort--even Microsoft 
has gotten civilized enough to send reports only when there are serious 
problems (crashes) and to ask if you want the report sent.  In this case, I 
think that it is the wrong paradigm.  Much better to my mind would be a bug 
reporting and tracking system--Scarab, Bugzilla, or something 
equivalent--with voting to help establish priority.  RFEs are at least as 
important as fixes to existing features, and usage stats will be unhelpful 
for an alpha prototype.  Features that are used frequently probably work; 
features used infrequently are either minimally useful, defective, or 
unknown to the user--into which category should they be tossed?

Usage tracking makes sense if the design is mature.  That cannot be the 
case here.  Intelligent feedback is needed to improve the product; results 
from a feedback automaton are not likely to be very useful.  Also:  having 
a feedback automaton at this stage will "taint" release versions.  If you 
play "Big Brother" at this stage, users will be suspicious that you have 
perfected spying in the release versions and no longer inform the 
user.  [Having source code will help to allay this fear, but probably not 
entirely.]


At 01:17 PM 5/18/2005, Terence Parr wrote:
>...
>By knowing which features you use in the GUI we can focus on
>improving those features.  By tracking info about your grammar and
>how much lookahead is used during actual parsing, I can optimize
>ANTLR v3 for the full release.

That sounds nice, but in reality you would probably get much more 
information from processing ANTLR 2 grammars translated to ANTLR 3.


>How do people feel about this?  Seems like it shouldn't bother
>anybody and it will *only* occur during the pre-release days when
>we'll have debugging and other stuff in there anyway.  Most people
>will be waiting for a full release, but the courageous and intrepid
>v3 pre-release users will have to hit "OK" once a week in the
>GUI. ;)  Naturally if you don't use the GUI, you will never see the
>dialog and no data will be sent.

Forget the spyware, install a bug tracking database which users contribute 
to.  Save the spyware for class labs--there it might provide information 
for designing a help system for newbies.

--Loring


>Regards,
>Terence
>--
>CS Professor & Grad Director, University of San Francisco
>Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
>Cofounder, http://www.jguru.com