The maintainer’s responses in that thread are really frustrating. They just keep describing the bug as though the package’s behavior is acceptable.

I wonder what debian’s process is for dealing with such maintainers.

I hope they make “no phone home” actual policy soon.

Infuriating. The developer is just making excuses and refusing to address the users' actual concern. And why are they phoning home in the first place? What is this critical use case that requires this intrusion?

    "This daily count of users is what keeps us working on the project, because otherwise we have feel like we are coding into a void."

So, they wrote code to phone home (by default) and then digging in and defending it... just for their feelings? You've got to be kidding me!

> So, they wrote code to phone home (by default) and then digging in and defending it... just for their feelings? You've got to be kidding me!

Is that better or worse than phoning home to serve ads?

Also, if feels misleading to me to call fetching a motd phoning home. You know Ubuntu does this too right? That feels more worthy of outrage than this.

If someone tells me, this software phones home, and it's not transmitting anything other than a ping; kinda feels like they're lying to me about what it's actually doing.

I'm not upset by the author wanting a bit of human connection to the people who enjoy his software. I empathize with the desire to see people enjoy the stuff I've made. Is it a privacy risk? Perhaps, but it's not even on the top 1k that I see daily. There's more important windmills to tilt at.

But... if you really just wanna be outraged; I recently wrote a DNS server that I use as the default for my home system. Currently It prints every request made, you might wanna try something like that. If you're that upset about this, you're gonna be blown away by what else is going on you didn't even know about.... and that's just dns queries, it's not even the telemetry getting sent!