Does Fireinfo track Pakfire? Can it?

Add-Ons
1

Does Fireinfo keep track of Pakfire installed addons?

I looked at the Fireinfo (menu System > System Information) and I didn’t see anything that looked familiar.

Knowing the installed addons might help decide which addons should be kept (and maintained). And what addons should be dropped.

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2

IPFire > Pakfire shows on the right side the addons installed.

3

I was referring to knowing the total addon usage per addon.

Like this: https://fireinfo.ipfire.org/releases but for addons.

4

No, we do not have that information. We do not track downloads either.

I am not sure if there is any value in having this information.

5

The real value is determining what addon to support and what to delete from the list…

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6

In my point of view, it is rather difficult to determine the usage of an add-on by its installations. Some people might install a bunch of it without ever using it, while others might forget to remove add-ons they do not need any more.

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7

Agreed. But the first step is to track installed addons. A second step (and probably more difficult) could be to track active addons.

The first step would give authors feedback, in the form of data, on their addon (besides the Community/forum feedback)

8

And again, what problem will this data solve? I do not see when we struggled to make a decision because of lack of such data.

9

Hi @jon,

I think your idea of having addons installation statistics [Fireinfo] is great, and your arguments for that are excellent !

With the wide offer of addons [for IPFire], it’s a nice opportunity for some to stand out - and offer a translation into their native language :wink:

I hope your idea moves forward in the minds of the IPFire’s lead team.

Best, Stéphane

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10

Tracking number of downloads for each addon is still better than nothing.
And it is not invasive to anyones privacy.
Oviously unmaintained addons should go.

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11

We have more than 10 mirrors that does not report the downloads to us so we cannot track this.

12

Actually, according to https://mirrors.ipfire.org/, IPFire is currently being distributed by 27 mirrors. :wink:

13

Hi,

it seems to me that the idea is to list installed addons with FireInfo (and therefore used), not the number of downloads reported by the mirrors.

So we would have an installation number for each addon (as we already have for IPFire release), and therefore the interest of the community in this addon.

Downloading an addon (by the mirrors) can only be a temporary test (which will be uninstalled later), therefore less relevant data.

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14

IMVHO this data could help you to understand better which kind of use is done by IpFire adopters.
I don’t suggest to use IpFire as OneComputerBand distro due to lack of various things, but someone would be happy to create a megamix of DB Server, Backup Server, ApplicationServer, Swissknife server…

15

Hi,

for security purposes, people should run as little services as possible on a firewall. Any
additional process and port opened up increases the attack surface. The more add-ons we
maintain, the greater their maintenance/development “costs” and the easier it will be for
users to configure their firewall in an insecure way.

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller

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16

So why don’t remove the addons?
If the maintenance/development burden is too heavy, maybe dropping the addons (at least for finalize IpFire 3) could release more energy for the main goal…

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17

But who says that we do not understand our users?

18

I wrote “understand better”, not “understand”.
Even if don’t agree with the development team on several things (and IMO is quite normal, there’s no “standard” person in the world, don’t matter what the statistics and the organizational models can say) I am not assuming that you (development team) don’t understand the adopters.

19

Okay, but that still does not change my first statement. I do not see what question we are trying to answer here?

Are add-ons being used? Probably every add-on is used by at least someone.

How often is something used? Does that matter?

20

To revive the discussion ( or even bring it to an end it, if the topic isn’t interesting anymore):

The last days ( since release of core 152 ) brought up broad discussions about issues in samba.
I think this bound some development power.
Regarding this it would be, IMO, ‘nice’, to have some numbers about usage of this functionality ( SMB file/print server ). How urgent is it, to fix this?

Same arguments are true for other servers in the IPFire system ( for example the various media servers ).

Regards,
Bernhard

1 Like