On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 04:01:57PM +0200, Christian Couder wrote:

On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 3:50 PM Dragan Simic [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

quoted

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).

I agree that it should actually be disabled by default, for privacy
and security reasons, but that would actually defeat its purpose, so
I'm not really sure should it be merged.

One possibility is to send just the `sysname`, described as 'Operating
system name (e.g., "Linux")', field of the struct utsname filled out
by uname(2) by default.

That would be better to me. I still don't love it, but I admit it's
coming more from a knee-jerk response than from some rational argument
against people knowing I run Linux.

Since HTTP user-agent fields are common, we can look at those for prior
art. curl sends its own version but nothing else. Most browsers do seem
to include some OS information. My version of firefox gives its own
version along with "Linux x86_64". So basically "uname -sm".

And then there might be a knob to deactivate it completely or to make
it more verbose (which might be useful for example in a corporate
context).

Yes, I think we should definitely have an option to suppress or override
it, just like we do for the user-agent string.

-Peff