Fedora's FESCo Approves Of A "Sane" Approach For Counting Fedora Users Via DNF

Monday's weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee approved of a means for the DNF package manager to integrate some user counting capabilities as long as it's a "sane" approach and not the UUID-driven proposal originally laid out.

Originally the plan was to come up with a new UUID identifier system just for counting Fedora users so those in the Fedora project and at Red Hat can have a better idea for the number of Fedora users and other insights. But the concept of having a unique identifier for Fedora users wasn't well received, even if it was trying to not track users or reveal other personal information.

Baked over the past month was a new privacy-minded plan for counting users via DNF that relies upon a "countme" bit that will be incremented weekly or so and not have any UUID as originally envisioned. See that earlier article for more details on this current plan.

During Monday's FESCo meeting, the members voted in favor of the plan as long as "the actual implementation is sane." That was laid out in the meeting minutes.

We'll see if this new DNF "countme" user counter gets wrapped up time for this spring's Fedora 30 release or will be delayed until Fedora 31 in the autumn. At the FESCo meeting they also officially approved having GCC 9 be the default system compiler, which was widely expected anyhow given their preference for always shipping with the latest GNU compiler and in fact the developers had already landed the new compiler into Rawhide in its near-final state.