Re: [PATCH 0/3] Advertise OS version

On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 03:18:40PM +0200, Dragan Simic wrote:

Hello Christian,

On 2024-06-19 14:57, Christian Couder wrote:

quoted

For debugging and statistical purposes, it can be useful for Git
servers to know the OS the client are using.

So let's add a new 'os-version' capability to the v2 protocol, in the
same way as the existing 'agent' capability that lets clients and
servers exchange the Git version they are running.

This sends the same info as `git bugreport` is already sending, which
uses uname(2). It should be the same as what `uname -srvm` returns,
except that it is sanitized in the same way as the Git version sent by
the 'agent' capability is sanitized (by replacing character having an
ascii code less than 32 or more than 127 with '.').

This may probably be a useful debugging feature, but I strongly
suggest that a configuration knob exists that makes disabling it
possible.  For security reasons, some users may not want to
publicly advertise their OSes and kernel versions.  Count me in
as one of such users. :)

Agreed. We do send the Git version, which is already a slight privacy
issue (though it can be overridden at both build-time and run-time). But
OS details seems like crossing a line to me.

I don't mind if this is present but disabled by default, but then I
guess it is not really serving much of a purpose, as hardly anybody
would enable it. Which makes collecting large-scale statistics by
hosting providers pretty much useless (and I don't think it is all that
useful for debugging individual cases).

-Peff