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aliBuild's Anonymous Aggregate User Behaviour Analytics

aliBuild has begun gathering anonymous aggregate user behaviour analytics. You will be notified the first time you run an aliBuild with this feature enabled, and you will be able to opt out. Read below for all the details.

Why?

Resources which we can dedicate to support multiple architectures and compilers are limited. As a result, we do not have the resources to do detailed user studies of aliBuild users to decide on how best to design future features and prioritise current work. Anonymous aggregate user analytics allow us to prioritise fixes and features based on how, where and when people use aliBuild. For example:

  • if a recipe is widely used and is failing often it will enable us to prioritise fixing that recipe over others.
  • collecting the OS version allows us to decide what versions of Linux / OS X to prioritise and support and identify build failures that occur only on single versions.

What?

aliBuild's analytics record some shared information for every event:

aliBuild's analytics records the following different events:

  • a screenview hit type with the official aliBuild command you have run (with arguments stripped) e.g. aliBuild build (not aliBuild build AliceO2)
  • an event hit type with the install event category, the aliBuild recipe you have requested to build and any used options e.g. AliRoot devel=AliRoot sys=cmake deps=ROOT as the action and an event label e.g. osx_x86-64 to indicate the OS version. This allows us to identify formulae that need fixed and where more easily.
  • an event hit type with the BuildSuccess event category, the aliBuild recipe invoked to install e.g. zlib as the action and an event label e.g. osx_x86-64 v1.2.8 abcdef0123 to indicate the architecture, the version and the hash of the package being build.
  • an event hit type with the BuildError event category, the aliBuild formula that failed to install e.g. AliRoot as the action and an event label e.g. osx_x86-64 master abcdef0123 to indicate the architecture, the branch / tag and the commit that failed.
  • an exception hit type with the exception event category, exception description of the exception name e.g. IOError and whether the exception was fatal e.g. 1

You can also view all the information that is sent by aliBuild's analytics by setting ALIBUILD_ANALYTICS_DEBUG=1 in your environment. Please note this will also stop any analytics being sent.

It is impossible for the aliBuild developers to match any particular event to any particular user, even if we had access to the aliBuild analytics user ID (which we do not). As far as we can tell it would be impossible Google to match the randomly generated aliBuild-only analytics user ID to any other Google Analytics user ID. If Google turned evil the only thing they could do would be to lie about anonymising IP addresses and attempt to match users based on IP addresses.

When/Where?

aliBuild's analytics are sent throughout aliBuild's execution to Google Analytics over HTTPS.

Who?

aliBuild's analytics are accessible to aliBuild's current maintainers and ALICE Offline Coordination.

How?

The code is viewable in:

https://github.com/alisw/alibuild/blob/master/alibuild_helpers/analytics.py

They are done in a separate background process and fail fast to avoid delaying any execution. They will fail immediately and silently if you have no network connection.

Opting out

aliBuild analytics helps us maintainers and leaving it on is appreciated. However, if you want to opt out of aliBuild's analytics, you can set this variable in your environment:

export ALIBUILD_NO_ANALYTICS=1

Alternatively, this will prevent analytics from ever being sent:

aliBuild analytics off

In case you decide you want to turn analytics back on:

aliBuild analytics on

Thanks

We would like to thank the Homebrew project as this file and the actual python reimplementation of the analytics is based on their documentation and code.